The First World War and the English War Poets : From Thomas Hardy to Isaac Rosenberg (V) Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

摘要

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol in 1890 into a poor Russian Jewish family. He began writing and circulating poems while very young, attracting some attention among his friends. When the Great War broke out, he delayed enlisting as long as he could, for he, like the rest of his family, detested war and he was physically and temperamentally unfit for military service. He remarked in a letter from the trenches, "I never joined the army from patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war." Non etheless, driven by poverty, he enlisted and in 1916 was sent to France as a private, where he fell in action in 1918. He was twenty-seven.To Rosenberg, the war was a new experience: he wrote of the "strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life," in a letter from the front. Few of his war poems such as "Dead Heroes" or "Soldier: Twentieth Century" depict the patriotic fervor and glorification of sacrifice in battle that prevailed in England during the war. However, in most of his best war poems such as "A worm fed on the heart of Corinth" and "Dead Man's Dump" , both descriptive and meditative, the poet presents his own view of the nature of war as an inhuman, callous European conflict through wild, powerful, appalling, and painful images. The poems also meditate on the nature of death as a process of life, the deterministic view of warfare, the human responsibility for the carnage, expressing great tenderness towards the helpless victims of war in a seemingly detached impersonal tone.