This week's poem, Returning, We Hear Larks, is one of Isaac Rosenberg's most popular war poems, but I often wonder if he'd have made further revisions, given time. It's among the last handful of poems he wrote, working on scraps of paper in circumstances that would have silenced a less motivated artist. Yet the piece is typically his own, while laying bare the diverse influences integral to his style.
Rosenberg's life and work are a fusion of conflicting energies. To begin with the obvious ones: he was a painter and playwright as well as a poet. His first language was Yiddish; his first literary inspiration the Old Testament. Some of his best prewar poems are in the style of Blake and not shallow imitations, either. Symbolist, realist, modernist, Romantic: Rosenberg could be selectively anthologised to embody any of these movements.