Summary
This new selection brings together the poetry of three of the most distinctive and moving voices to emerge from the First World War. Here are the controlled passion and rich metaphors of Wilfred Owen's celebrated verses such as 'Anthem for Doomed Youth' and 'Strange Meeting', along with many of his lesser-known works. The elegiac poems of Ivor Gurney, including 'Requiem' and 'The Silent One', reflect his love of language, music and landscape, while the visceral works of Isaac Rosenberg, such as 'Break of Day in the Trenches', are filled with stark imagery but also, as in 'Louse Hunting', with vitality and humour. Each poet reflects the disparate experiences of ordinary soldiers in war, and attempts to capture man's humanity in the most inhumane of circumstances.
The son of poor immigrants from Lithuania and Russia, Rosenberg spent his youth as an apprentice to an engraver. He attended the Slade School of Art, where he became competent as a portraitist. In 1915, he joined the army, to help support his family, and spent two years in the French trenches. He was killed while on dawn patrol in 1918. His poetry, which reached a mature style and resonance only at the end of his life, starkly and brutally reveals the sensibility of the soldier amid the miasma of the Great War. His best-known poems, such as "Louse Hunting," "Returning, We Hear the Larks," and "Break of Day in the Trenches," are keenly modern in their ironic displacement of the overwhelming realities of war; the focus of these poems is, respectively, lice, birds, and a "queer sardonic rat." Yet in these seemingly marginal aspects of the war, Rosenberg brilliantly embeds its banal horrors. His Collected Poems was published posthumously in 1922. (Bowker Author Biography)
