Ernest de Selincourt's review of Isaac Rosenberg's poems was published in the TLS of June 15, 1922.

ISAAC ROSENBERG’S POEMS.
POEMS. By ISAAC ROSENBERG.

The name of Isaac Rosenberg must be added to the long list of those whose promise was cut short by the war. Born at Bristol in 1890, and brought up by his parents in the East-end of London, by the time he was fourteen he had already convinced the headmaster of Stepney Board School of his talent for drawing and writing, and was allowed to devote all his time to these pursuits. At sixteen he composed the remarkable poem “Zion”, which Mr. Gordon Bottomley – a friend to whom he was known only by correspondence – includes in this final selection from his works:–

She stood – a hill-ensceptered Queen,
The glory streaming from her;
While Heaven flashed her rays between
And shed eternal summer.

It was a wonder indeed that strains like these should come from Whitechapel, and no wonder at all that their author, sending, after some years, a few sheets of verse to Mr. Laurence Binyon, with a request for criticism, should have been at once generously received and welcomed by him into the brotherhood of poets. Much was difficult for Rosenberg: his circumstances were deadening, he was at grips with poverty all his life; but he had this consolation at least, that his gifts were understood: his achievement to be was sympathetically anticipated by discerning admirers, he had never to launch, as so many artists must do, on the blank heedlessness of the world. On his side, he responded eagerly to their encouragement, and bent himself with an almost fierce determination to the task of justifying their belief in him. When war broke out and he had to suffer all its uncongenial disciplinary routine – he enlisted in 1915 – the chief burden on his mind was that his zest for poetry abandoned him. “Since I left the hospital” he wrote on one occasion to Mr. Bottomley, “all the poetry has quite gone out of me. I seem even to forget words, and I believe if I met anybody with ideas I’d be dumb.” He is often punished for forgetfulness of inattention to military duties, and never dreams of assigning this forgetfulness to its cause. After a rough time in the trenches, he writes to a friend in England, “I can call the evenings – that is, from tea to lights out – my own; but there is no chance whatever for seclusion or any hope of writing poetry now. This life seems to have blunted me. I seem to be powerless to compel my will to any direction, and all I do is without energy and interest.” This singleness of devotion to the arts is infinitely touching; but greater issues were at stake. Rosenberg was killed in April, 1918.

His gifts had been recognized; with them there was in his character an exacting and indomitable persistency which, had he lived, would have made their full expression sure. As we actually see him, in circumstances always adverse and at last overwhelming to his art, he exhibits the element of weakness in his nature in the tensity, the restless striving after strength, which make his poetry more strange than beautiful and leads him away, as his mind takes fire, into regions of even cloudier incomprehensibility. In his own view, the best of his poems is one which he calls alternatively “The Amazons,” or “The Daughters of War.” “It has taken me about a year to write,” he tells a friend, “for I have changed and rechanged it and thought hard over that poem, and striven to get that sense of inexorableness the human (or unhuman) side of this war has.” There can be no doubt but that he would have gone on changing it if he could. As it comes to us, it reads a little like one of the obscurer passages from Blake’s prophetic books, with this chief difference, that Blake never seems obscurer than he means to be and is serenely satisfied with his own smoke, while Rosenberg is hot in chase after some large idea which, for all its splendour and impressiveness, contrives still to elude him:

These maidens came, these strong ever-living Amazons,
Clouding the wild lustres, the clinging tender
lights;
Driving the darkness into the flame of day
With the Amazonian wind of them
Over our corroding faces
That must be broken – broken for ever more,
So the soul can leap out
Into their huge embraces.

His definition of “simple poetry,” in a letter to Mr. Gordon Bottomley, is itself an indication of the difficulty of his approach to it: “simple poetry – that is, where an interesting complexity of thought is kept in tone and right value to the dominating idea so that it is understandable and still ungraspable. I know it is beyond my reach just now, except in bits. I am always afraid of being empty.” But emptiness, as his friends must frequently have assured him, was the last thing he needed to fear. He had a genius for the vivid phrase, for illumination in flashes; if he could have learned co-ordination, and calmness, the broad handling of the texture of his art, he must assuredly have won a lasting place in the annals of our literature. Here are some of his lines to “Our Dead Heroes”:

Flame out, you glorious skies,
Welcome our brave;
Kiss their exultant eyes
Give what they gave.
Flash, mailèd seraphim,
Your burning spears;
New days to outfame their dim
Heroic years.
Flame out, flame out, 0 song!
Star ring to star;
Strong as our hurt is strong
Our children are.
England – Time gave them thee
They gave back this,
To win Eternity
And claim God’s kiss.

Stringency of form compels continuity here; in line after line the burning heat of the opening stanza is maintained, and Rosenberg brings to adequate conclusion the rhapsody which a more experienced craftsman would hardly have dared to begin.

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