Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25 November 1890, to Jewish immigrant parents from Lithuania. His family moved to the East End of London in 1897, and after a rudimentary education Rosenberg at 14 was apprenticed to an engraver. Wealthy patrons enabled him to study at the Slade School of Art (1911-13) and for nine months in 1914-15 he lived in South Africa. The only poems to be collected in his lifetime were self-published in pamphlet form — Night at Day (1912), Youth, (1915), and Moses (1916). Enlisting in the Army in October 1915 he served on the Western Front until his death on night patrol on 1 April 1918.