Quotes by Isaac Rosenberg
Nobody ever told me what to read, or ever put poetry in my way.
I am determined that this war, with all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting; that is, if I am lucky enough to come through all right.
I can't look at things in the simple, large way that great poets do.
You mustn't forget the circumstances I have been brought up in, the little education I have had.
Poetical appreciation is only newly bursting on me.
I wanted to write a battle song for the Judeans but so far I can think of nothing noble and weighty enough.
I never joined the army for patriotic reasons.
I don't think I knew what real poetry was till I read Keats a couple of years ago.
Being by the nature of my upbringing, all my energies having been directed to one channel of activity, crippled from other activities and made helpless even to live.
Nothing can justify war.
My mind is so cramped and dulled and fevered, there is no consistency of purpose, no oneness of aim; the very fibres are torn apart, and application deadened by the fiendish persistence of the coil of circumstance.
I despair of ever writing excellent poetry.
It is true I have not been killed or crippled, been a loser in the stocks, or had to forswear my fatherland, but I have not quite gone free and have a right to say something.
It's really my being lucky enough to bag an inch of candle that incites me to this pitch of punctual epistolary. I must measure my letter by the light.
I can only say that one's individual situation is more real and important to oneself than the devastations of fates and empires especially when they do not vitally affect oneself.
I will not leave a corner of my consciousness covered up, but saturate myself with the strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life, and it will all refine itself into poetry later on.
Death could drop from the dark As easily as song— But song only dropped,
Earth has waited for them, All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last!
When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth.
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins Drop, and are ever dropping;...
The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences.
