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Rosenberg’s poetry does not stop short of the pity and tenderness in Owen’s, but passes
beyondit into something new. He is aware that the suffering of war is too great to
be comforted, and he cannot mistake pity for succour; in his poetry, suffering achieves
something like classical composure...his victims have a heroic moral strength, a stoicism
which invites the mind not to the frustrating pity of helplessness, but to something like the
re-creative pity of the ancient stage.^8
WhereasOwenwritesoutoftheRomantictradition,Rosenberg’sworkisprofoundly
influenced by the Metaphysical poet John Donne, whom Rosenberg began reading
in 1911, and whose poems he packed into his haversack when he headed for the
Front in October 1915.^9 The influence of the Metaphysicals on Rosenberg’s early
verse and later ‘trench poems’ plays an important though overlooked role in his
outsider status within popular critical accounts which have emphasized the war
poets’ exclusive inheritance of the Romantic tradition.^10 W. B. Yeats dismissed
Rosenberg’spoetryas‘allwindyrhetoric’^11 much as he dismissed Owen as ‘all
blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick’.^12 ‘All’ is the operative word, for had Yeats not
already committed himself to a categorical exclusion of war poetry from hisOxford
Book of Modern Verse(1936), he might have admired the ‘heroic moral strength’ and
‘stoicism’ of Rosenberg’s speakers, their almost Yeatsian embrace of the ‘re-creative
pity of the ancient stage’.^13
(^8) Marius Bewley,Masks & Mirrors: Essays in Criticism(New York: Atheneum, 1970), 289–90.
(^9) In addition to Donne’s poems, Rosenberg packedone other book into his haversack: the
seventeenth-century prose masterpieceReligio Medici, written by Donne’s junior contemporary Sir
Thomas Browne. We do not yet know for certain which Donne edition Miss Winifreda Seaton gave to
Rosenberg in 1911; the book, like Rosenberg’s body, was never recovered. The 1896 Muses’ Library
edition of Donne (which Edgell Rickword had with him in the trenches in France) was reprinted
in both 1901 and 1904, and is a likely guess, since Rosenberg clearly seems to have acquired his
copy of Donne prior to the publication of H. J. C. Grierson’s 2-vol. 1912 edition. It is possible that
Rosenberg, who was reading Walter Pater at the time, was drawn to Browne’sReligio Mediciby Pater’s
commentary on Browne’s work inAppreciations, with an Essay on Style, 4th edn. (London: Macmillan,
1901). He might also have been a part of the growing interest in Browne at the Slade School of Art.
Fellow classmates Gwen Raverat and Stanley Spencer showed a great deal of interest in Browne at
this time. In 1910, Raverat did two woodcuts of Browne, and Spencer’s letters reveal that he was so
inspired by Browne’sUrn Burialthat in 1912 he buried several of his drawings in a tin in the earth
off Mill Lane in Cookham, thinking often of them lying underground when he travelled into London
eachdaytogototheSlade.
(^10) Identifying the all too ‘familiar ground in tracing links between the war poets and their Romantic
ancestors’, Christopher Martininsists that there are ‘other pointsto make’. See Martin, ‘War Poets’,
Essays in Criticism, 30/3 (July 1980), 270.
(^11) W. B. Yeats, quoted in Fred D. Crawford,British Poets of the Great War(Cranbury, NJ: Associated
University Presses, 1998), 202.
(^12) Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley, 21 Dec. 1936, inThe Letters of W. B. Yeats, ed. Allan Wade (London:
Rupert Hart-Davis, 1954), 874. 13
Rosenberg, who was himself writing ‘Moses’, a play in dramatic verse, wrote to Mrs Herbert
Cohen from the trenches: ‘We are on a long march and I’m writing this on the chance of getting it off;
so you should know I received your papers and also your letter....I am glad Yeats liked your play:
His criticism is an honour. He is the established great man and it is a high thing to receive praise from
him’ (Rosenberg to Mrs Herbert Cohen, n.d., inCollected Works, 237).