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Isaac Rosenberg, author of some of the most poignant war poems ever written, died in the French trenches of The Western Front on the first of April 1918, just a few months before the end of the "…the war to end all wars".

April 2018 marks the centenary of the death of this unassuming young East London poet. Born in 1890 to a working class family of Yiddish-speaking immigrant Lithuanian Jews. His death left English poetry with some of its most brilliant and moving poems of human conflict and aspiration.

Rosenberg was one of the ‘Whitechapel Boys’, a group of young Jewish men who met regularly at the haven of Whitechapel Library, all of them deeply influenced by the aesthetic and socialist ideas that permeated the streets of radical East London at the turn of the century. In this tribute to his poetry, Chris Searle seeks to present Rosenberg’s words as a narrative of his times, his world and his unique imagination.

He is one of the great poets to emerge from the bilingual culture of the east european jewish community that characterised Whitechapel in the first half of the twentieth century. Rosenberg was an innovator and another ‘Whitechapel Boy’, his friend Joseph Leftwich, described his poems as "jewels of English poetry… He was in the tradition of great visionary poets, like Blake."

Searle’s account is accompanied by a photographic essay by the English photographer Ron McCormick, who lived and worked in Rosenberg’s streets and who documented the passing of ‘Old Jewish Whitechapel' during the early 1970s, portraying the street scenes and atmosphere that would have been familiar to the ‘Whitechapel Boys’. His powerful depiction of a unique mix of neighbours and community evokes the spirit of Rosenberg’s East London half a century before.