Isaac Rosenberg

Until I read about an exhibition in London at the Ben Uri Gallery, I didn't know that Isaac Rosenberg was a painter; he is, of course, well known as a poet, especially of poems about The First World War. His "Poems from the Trenches" is a famous collection of his poems.
But I read that he was at first a painter, chiefly of portraits (chiefly self portraits), having studied at The Slade after leaving school at 16.
Six months before hostilities ended in 1918 Rosenberg was killed; his body, like Kipling's son, was never found. Unlike most war poets he was not only Jewish but a private soldier.
I looked up some of his poems and though I find the language quite difficult they are really impressive, not so melancholy and high-minded and troubled as, say, Wilfred Owen, but earthy and down there with the ordinary soldiers.
And the lice!
When my uncle came home from the war in 1918, my father told me, he was covered from top to toe in lice. My father and his mother ran a bath of water and my uncle got in, clothes still on, then got out naked, free of lice.
Rosenberg writes of lice in the trenches in WW1 in "Louse Hunting".

"Then we all sprang up and stript
To hunt the verminous brood."

I must try to visit the exhibition of Rosenberg's paintings, there until June 8th.