‘for isaac rosenberg’ Yeats’s judgement notwithstanding, Rosenberg has remained an important
andcontinuing influence on twentieth-century English and Irish poets. In 1975,
Jean Liddiard remarked that ‘Rosenberg has been something of a poet’s poet,
admired—if I am not mistaken—by Geoffrey Hill, Charles Tomlinson, C. H.
Sisson, Jon Silkin, Ted Hughes and many others.’^14 In this essay, I will be discussing
three poems entitled ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’, written by contemporary poets: the
English poet Geoffrey Hill (b. 1932), the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley
(b. 1939), and the Irish poet CathalO Searcaigh (b. 1956). If Rosenberg’s death ́
on April Fool’s Day was befitting a poet whose ‘whole life was permeated by
the ridiculous’ and whose ‘luck was forever bad’,^15 then it is worth noting that
these three dedicatory poems have suffered a decidedly Rosenbergian fate: Hill’s
‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ (1952) was never collected, Longley’s ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’
(1983) changed its title to ‘No Man’s Land’ prior to publication, andO Searcaigh’s ́
‘For Isaac Rosenberg’ (1997) is written not in English but in Gaelic. These three
poems represent an obscured but enduring heritage of contemporary poets reading
and writing about Rosenberg in ways that expose new and invigorating points of
entry into this poet’s work. Hill engages with Rosenberg as a Metaphysical poet,
Longley’s Rosenberg represents the larger omission of Anglo-Jewish life stories from
family and literary history, andO Searcaigh identifies with the marginalization of ́
Rosenberg while also confronting his own non-combatant status. The similarities
and dissimilarities between these three dedicatory poems are a vivid testament
not only to the complexity of Rosenberg’s verse but also to the notion that,
as Jacob Isaacs stated in 1937, Rosenberg ‘could receive no greater recognition
than the influence he now exerted on contemporary poetry, and on writers of
to-day’.^16 Setting Rosenberg’s critical neglect against his prominence among three
contemporary poets, we shall see that the poets are responding to what the criticism
has so far missed, and that Rosenberg emerges as a vital figure for contemporary
British and Irish poets attempting to write in and about a troubled world in which
‘the open wounds of history’^17 left by the two World Wars and the Northern Irish
Troubles continue to press upon the poetic imagination.
In 1952, in the small poetry journalIsis, Geoffrey Hill, then a student of English
literature at Keble College, Oxford, published the following little-known and as yet
uncollected poem, ‘For Isaac Rosenberg’:
Princes dying with damp curls
In the accomplishment of fame(^14) Jean Liddiard, ‘Introduction to Rosenberg and Commentary on Letter’,European Judaism,9/2
(1975), 25.
(^15) Cohen,Journey to the Trenches,5–6.
(^16) Jacob Isaacs, then a lecturer in EnglishLiterature at London University, is paraphrased in ‘Isaac
Rosenberg: Memorial Exhibition of Paintings and Drawings’, 17 Jewish Chronicle, 25 June 1937, 41.
Fran Brearton,The Great War in Irish Poetry(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 258.