war poetry and the realm of the senses tool. However, if we interrogate our responses closely, we realize that at times we
areeven made party to the violence we seem to be repudiating. In ‘Apologia pro
Poemate Meo’, Owen writes about an offensive: ‘For power was on us as we slashed
bones bare|Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.’^62 Through his linguistic
energy, he often transfers the ‘power’ on to us, the readers: Owen at least owns the
experience he evokes; we do not.
Rosenberg: ‘warm thought’
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If sound and sense carry us through Owen’s verse with their breath-taking fluency,
the poetry of Rosenberg records the reverse process: a constant struggle and
wrestling with ideas, images, and language. In a letter to Edward Marsh on 4
August 1916, he writes: ‘You know how earnestly one must wait on ideas, (you
cannot coax real ones to you) and let as it were, a skin grow naturally round
and through them.’ When the ideas come ‘hot’, the artist must ‘seize them with
the skin in tatters raw, crude, in some parts beautiful in others monstrous’.^63 In
contrast to Owen’s ‘words bleeding-fresh’,^64 it is ideas that come to Rosenberg with
temperature and texture. The description is at once indicative of the quality of
‘warm thought’^65 that characterizes his poetry as well as his deeply fraught relation
with the English literary tradition. ‘Scriptural and sculptural’, Sassoon famously
said, ‘are the epithets I would apply to him’:^66 the near-repetition neatly captures
the intimate connection between the racial and the linguistic in the works of this
Anglo-Jewish poet-painter from the East End of London. For there is a definite
Hebraic and visual imagination at work in his poems as he tries to ‘model’ words
in the English language.
Rosenberg, with his sparkling metropolitan wit and irony, remains something
of an oddity in the canon of First World War poetry, refusing to be assimilated
just as he was an outsider in the military by dint of his class, race, and height.
Yet, this might reflect the way in which First World War verse has privileged a
rhetoric of piousness and pity that excludes the playful, corroborating, perhaps
(^62) Owen, ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’, i. 124.
(^63) Isaac Rosenberg to Edward Marsh, 4 Aug. 1916, inThe Collected Works, 239. See alsoThe Poems
and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Vivien Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), p. xviii.
For details about Rosenberg’s life, see Jean Liddiard,Isaac Rosenberg: The Half-Used Life(London:
Victor Gollancz, 1975) and Jean Moorcroft Wilson,Isaac Rosenberg: Poet and Painter(London: Cecil
Woolf, 1975). Also see D. W. Harding,Experience into Words: Essays on Poetry(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1963), 91–103; Dennis Silk, ‘Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918)’,Judaism, 14 (Fall 1965),
462–74; Jon Silkin,Out of Battle: Poetry of the Great War(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972),
249–314. 64
65 Owen, ‘The Poet in Pain’, inComplete Poems and Fragments, i. 111.
66 Rosenberg, ‘[A warm thought flickers]’, inPoems and Plays, 106.
Sassoon, ‘Foreword’, in Rosenberg,Collected Works,p.ix.