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."