So cautious and suspicious, in fact, is the whole reading population, the critics and the readers, that a poet like Isaac Rosenberg, for instance, a young English Jew who was killed in France and whose poems were posthumously published, can pass them by altogether. Isaac Rosenberg was one of the few poets who might have served as a fair challenge to sham modernism. He had, one would say, everything to recommend him. His verse was irregular but not too irregular; his meaning was difficult but not too difficult; his references were not far-fetched; he knew his Bible well--a great recommendation to any public; and he died young and in battle. But he was not celebrated and for this reason: that the two editors of his posthumous volume, Mr. Bottomley and Mr. Binyon, both ‘safe’ poets, introduced him merely as a poet of promise killed in defence of his country: “the immaturities of style and taste are apparent on the surface”. The critics in England by 1922 had ceased to blow the trumpet over young poets of promise killed in the War--the reaction against war-poetry had set in. In America, however, because he was a Jew he was used as a pawn in literary politics; but his vogue was short-lived. The real reason why he was generally overlooked was that, in spite of falling into the friendship of the early Georgian Group and accepting their criticism of his work through loneliness, he was not classifiable as a member of a group, or yet, because of his quietness, as a sensational individual type. The following is a passage from his play _Moses_. A young Hebrew is speaking of Moses himself: Yesterday as I lay nigh dead with toil Underneath the hurtling crane oiled with our blood Thinking to end all and let the crane crush me He came by and bore me into the shade: O, what a furnace roaring in his blood Thawed my congealed sinews and tingled my own Raging through me like a strong cordial. He spoke! Since yesterday Am I not larger grown? I’ve seen men hugely shapen in soul, Of such unhuman shaggy male turbulence They tower in foam miles from our neck-strained sight, And to their shop only heroes come; But all were cripples to this speed Constrained to the stables of flesh. I say there is a famine in ripe harvest When hungry giants come as guests: Come knead the hills and ocean into food, There is none for him. The streaming vigours of his blood erupting From his halt tongue are like an anger thrust Out of a madman’s piteous craving for A monstrous baulked perfection.