Isaac Rosenberg almost seemed destined to die a cruelly ironic death as if being mocked by the gods from the day he was born in 1890. He was Jewish, economically deprived, wracked by poor health and of such an impressive physical stature that when he enlisted at the outbreak of World War I he was assigned to become part of the Bantam Battalion, surrounded by others of similar build. Many of them were anti-Semitic; doubtlessly Rosenberg’s resistance to romanticizing both cause and camaraderie did little to endear him further. His death occurred on a French battlefield on April Fool’s Day 1918
Rosenberg was no Promethean thief in the night, however; if anything, he was a burning flame that the gods stole from humans. Rosenberg joined the long list of names of writers who posthumous legacy was made by the verse written between the rain of armaments from the guys in the trenches on the other side, but whose career were likewise cut short by bullet with their number on it finally arriving.
Equally talented as both a painter and a poet, he struggled to determine which field to dedicate the bulk of his energy. The war decided for him: painting a portrait of what it was to like to wait for that bullet using words scribbled into notebook may not the easiest thing in the world, but it is certainly easier than trying to literally paint that portrait on a canvas. By the time he was killed in action, Rosenberg had already had an exhibition of his artwork at Whitechapel Gallery and published at his own expense a collection of verse titled Night and Day.
The war produce a great deal of lasting poems and poets, but Rosenberg is almost an iconoclastic outlier among other leading figures like Wilfrid Owen and Rupert Brooke. Among his most famous poems are “Break of Day in the Trenches,” “Returning, We Hear the Larks,” “Louse Hunting,” “On Receiving News of the War” “Dead Man’s Dump” and the atypical and uncharacteristic “The Female God” which expresses a progressive view on the gender political of religion which likely also made him an outcast. Collected Works is a posthumous collection of Rosenberg's verse which restored many to their original state after having been initially published in a 1922 collection heavily edited by Gordon Bottomley in a misguided attempt to clarify meaning made more difficult by Rosenberg's choices of archaic words.
The gods had not smiled on Isaac Rosenberg the man, but ultimately he did manage to engage in a little in a Promethean theft by stealing the secret immortality from them. For this transgression, the gods pulled one last prank on the man: after dying on night watch, his body was never found or recovered by his follow soldiers.
