"Perpetuating the Language": Romantic Tradition, the Genre Function, and the Origins of the Trench Lyric

This article argues that World War I poets such as Isaac Rosenberg and Edmund Blunden did not write their best poetry about WWI trench warfare by breaking with late-Romantic and Georgian traditions of poetry and writing "realistically" about trench warfare. Rather they adapted the nineteenth-century Romantic lyric to treat the new subject matter of modern war. Drawing on recent theories of genre, the paper shows through a close reading of several war poems and poets how the poetry of both major and minor poets exhibits a generic continuity, not a break, with the dominant tradition of Romantic poetry going back to Wordsworth.