His first collection of poems, Night and Day, was published in 1912 in an edition of just 50 copies whilst Rosenberg, a talented painter as well as a poet, was still studying at the Slade School of Art, and it would appear that no more than 100 copies were issued of his second collection, Youth of 1915.
Running to just 8ll including title page and contents leaf, a fragile copy of that scarce first edition of Youth made £400 in a Thomson Roddick & Laurie sale of August 11, where an inscribed first edition of his third and last publication, a play called Moses, accompanied by a few more verses, that was printed just days before he left for France with the King’s Own Royal Lancasters, was sold for £600.
In the original yellow card wrappers, this was a copy inscribed to a friend and fellow poet, Lascelles Abercrombie, whose poor health had seen him declared unfit for action and who spent his war years as a shell inspector in a Liverpool munitions factory. Along with Wilfrid Gibson and Walter de la Mare, Abercrombie was one of the three beneficiaries of Rupert Brooke’s will, but though he once described himself as “a mighty poet and brother to Browning”, his wider literary reputation has not lasted as well.
A lot offering copies of the 1922 and 1937 collected editions of Rosenberg’s poems, plus two others about his life, sold at £150.
Basil Liddell Hart’s copy of the 1929, first English edition of Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, lotted with a 1931 first English edition of The Road Back – both in chipped and slightly worn dust wrappers – brought a bid of £290 in the Carlisle sale.
The short poetic life of Private Isaac Rosenberg
ISAAC ROSENBERG had produced just two small pamphlet collections of verse and a play before he was killed in action on April Fool’s Day, 1918, but his reputation is now established as one of the finer war poets.
