Isaac Rosenberg

Isaac Rosenberg (Bristol, 1890 - Fampoux, 1918) was an English poet and artist of Lithuanian Jewish descent whose work ranks among the most notable poetry written during the First World War. He grew up in London's East End, a poor district with a large Jewish community, and from an early age he combined an interest in poetry with drawing and painting.

After an apprenticeship as an engraver on Fleet Street, he was able to pay for study at the Slade School of Fine Art in 1911, where he worked alongside David Bomberg, Mark Gertler, Stanley Spencer and Paul Nash. He published a small pamphlet of poems, Night and Day, in 1912, and exhibited paintings at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1914. Hoping a warmer climate would ease his chronic bronchitis, he went to Cape Town that same year, where he wrote a poem on hearing the news of the war, which he criticised from the outset. Back in England he published a second collection, Youth, in 1915 and, unable to find steady work, enlisted at the end of that year.

He served with the 12th Bantam Battalion of the Suffolk Regiment and later with the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment. He reached the Western Front in June 1916 and wrote poems in the trenches, among them 'Break of Day in the Trenches' and 'Dead Man's Dump'. After a period of illness he returned to the front line and was killed on the night of 1 April 1918 after a night patrol. It is disputed whether he died at the hands of a sniper or in hand-to-hand combat. His remains, first buried in a mass grave, were moved in 1926 to individual graves in the Bailleul Road East Cemetery.

His legacy rests largely on his poetry. Paul Fussell called 'Break of Day in the Trenches' the greatest poem of the war. Self-portraits of his are displayed at the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Britain, and a blue plaque commemorates him outside the Whitechapel Gallery. In 1985 he was honoured in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey, on a slate stone bearing an inscription by Wilfred Owen.