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The dead poet riding on the Tube

September 19, 2008 10:28

By

Dana Gloger

3 min read

An anti-war poem war by the late Isaac Rosenberg is to be displayed on the Underground.


When poet Isaac Rosenberg wrote On Receiving News of the War, he certainly would not have expected, that 90 years later, three-and-a-half million Tube passengers a day would be reading his work. But from Monday, the poem will be one of six displayed in 3,000 carriages across London's Underground network, as part of this year's autumn season of the Poems on the Underground scheme, which displays poetry on Tube trains for more than six months every year.

https://api.thejc.atexcloud.io/image-service/alias/contentid/173pqwt6vhvtvg5nxf2/Rosenberg_-Isaac-painting.jpg%3Ff%3Ddefault%26%24p%24f%3D66549ad?f=3x2&w=732&q=0.6Rosenberg, a well-respected British Jewish painter as well as a poet, wrote the poem in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War. Unlike most other writers' patriotic responses to the war expected to end all wars, he was critical of Britain's conflict with Germany from the start.

The brainchild behind the Poems on the Underground scheme is Jewish novelist Judith Chernaik, 73, from Gospel Oak in North-West London.

She says she chose the Rosenberg poem because it is "extremely moving" and because it anticipated "what was going to happen in the war, in the way poets often do".

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