Isaac Rosenberg Poetry Analysis

Register to read the introduction… John Press points out that it was, perhaps, the common soldiers who first apprehended the horror and suffering of the war in its full intensity, and the officers saw the conflict in a more heroic light than the other ranks (1969, 135). Life in the trenches was miserable for Rosenberg, not only because he was a private, but he was a Jew and an intellectual who did not have anyone to talk to about art or literature. What also makes him different from the other poets is the fact that he was a second generation immigrant, he was not as English as the others. During his London years, he had managed to go to art school, and his artistic background made him more aware of the colors and shapes of his surroundings: Sassoon called Rosenberg a "painter-poet" as he painted such vivid pictures in his poetry. Rosenberg's poems are not exactly about the action of war, he speaks not of battles, but of what the men are doing. His 'Louse Hunting', which shows the hideousness of trench life, portrays his artistic ability to effectively illustrate his ideas for the …show more content…
It is an accurate description of life in the trenches; it depicts the boring, day-to-day life in the trenches as the men lie waiting, endlessly, and just beyond are the men of the other nation, also waiting, while, just like Owen said, "nothing happens." These healthy men are stuck in the trenches, unable to move, but there is one thing that can move, the "queer sardonic rat," and it moves from trench to trench—even through enemy lines, and that is what makes it "cosmopolitan." While the rats are flourishing, the men are rotting away in the mud. Perkins acutely observes: "The 'cosmopolitan' reasonableness of the rat emphasizes by contrast the madness of the war" (287-8). Alone among the trench poets of 1917-1918, Isaac Rosenberg had an apocalyptic vision of the horror of modern warfare comparable with that of …show more content…
They were young, talented poets who (except for Sassoon) died in the prime of life, just like thousands of other soldiers—the main subjects of their poetry—so 'ungloriously' did. Theirs were the protests thousands of men have wanted to express; they protested against the futility of war. They were 'boys' in their twenties, but still they produced poetry of a quality rarely seen in more mature poets. They felt it was their duty to report what they saw, to inform the rest of the world about what was happening, in order to prevent it from ever happening again. Not only have critics wondered, as stated above, what Brooke's poetry would have been like had he seen the trenches, but they have also wondered how poetry in the twenties would have been different had Owen and Rosenberg survived. What we do know is asserted by Perkins: "The War Poets were perhaps too close to their subject, but they widened the possible tones and subjects of poetry, and it has never been the same"