Wordsworth on Epitaph: Language, Genre, Mortality

William Wordsworth's Essays upon Epitaphs is his longest work of literary criticism, yet it has received far less critical attention than the famous prefaces to Lyrics Ballads and the Poems of 1815. I argue that this is because of Wordsworth's elevation of epitaph to the status of an exemplary poetic genre. I contend that in treating epitaph as an exemplary genre, Essays upon Epitaphs implies a novel theory of poetic genre. This theory treats generic categories as necessarily instantiated in history and therefore as susceptible to contingent historical transformation.