Today is the 90th anniversary of the Armistice, the cessation of fighting that represented the beginning of the end of World War I. Among the more than 40 million casualties were Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg. About the last I’ve written here. In the fall of 1916, a year and a half before his death on April Fool’s Day, 1918, Rosenberg wrote a letter to his friend Laurence Binyon. It contains these brave, sad words:
“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 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.”
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