Three Poets of the First World War

The son of poor immigrants from Lithuania and Russia, Rosenberg spent his youth as an apprentice to an engraver. He attended the Slade School of Art, where he became competent as a portraitist. In 1915, he joined the army, to help support his family, and spent two years in the French trenches. He was killed while on dawn patrol in 1918. His poetry, which reached a mature style and resonance only at the end of his life, starkly and brutally reveals the sensibility of the soldier amid the miasma of the Great War. His best-known poems, such as "Louse Hunting," "Returning, We Hear the Larks," and "Break of Day in the Trenches," are keenly modern in their ironic displacement of the overwhelming realities of war; the focus of these poems is, respectively, lice, birds, and a "queer sardonic rat." Yet in these seemingly marginal aspects of the war, Rosenberg brilliantly embeds its banal horrors. His Collected Poems was published posthumously in 1922. 020