As a young man, he belonged to a group of Jewish friends who are today known as the Whitechapel Boys, many of whom later achieved fame as writers and artists.
Though less radical in his use of language, he has been compared to his more renowned Whitechapel friend, Isaac Rosenberg, in terms of diction and verbal energy.
In his twenties, he converted to Christianity and a large part of his poetry focused on his conversion and spiritual identity as a Jew and an Englishman.
Aaronson was born on 24 December 1894[note 1] at 34 Great Pearl Street, Spitalfields in the East End of London to poor Orthodox Jewish parents who had immigrated from Vilna in the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe.
At the time, the area was a hub of the Jewish diaspora and at the turn of the 20th century, a quarter of its population were Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.
Growing up in the East End, Aaronson was part of a group of friends who are today referred to as the Whitechapel Boys, all of whom were children of Jewish immigrants and shared literary and artistic ambitions.
[4] Aaronson was also involved in the Young Socialist League, where he and other Whitechapel Boys helped organise educational meetings on modern art and radical politics.
[8] He filed for divorce on grounds of her adultery with the theatre producer Theodore Komisarjevsky, and the much publicised suit was undefended.
[1] He was friends with the novelist Stephen Hudson, the sculptor Jacob Epstein, the media mogul Sidney Bernstein, the artists Mark Gertler and Matthew Smith and the poets Harold Monro, Louis MacNeice and Samuel Beckett.
His first collection of poems, Christ in the Synagogue, published by V. Gollancz in 1930, dealt to a large extent with his conversion and spiritual identity as both a Jew and an Englishman.
[8][15] Christ in the Synagogue reached only a small audience and received fewer than a dozen reviews, but The Manchester Guardian, The Nation and Athenaeum, The Times Literary Supplement, and The New Age wrote favourably of it.
Since Aaronson's poetry does not display formal innovation, literature professor William Baker, characterises him as "A post-Georgian rather than a modernist [poet]".
According to Jacobs, Aaronson was "clearly influenced by him in terms of diction, and in a kind of verbal energy which runs through a lot of his poetry.
"[17] According to his friend Joseph Leftwich, Aronson himself in old age acknowledged influences from both traditional Judaism and Martin Buber's unorthodox interpretation of Hasidism.