ABSTRACT

Mark Sandy reconsiders the indebtedness of First World War Poetry to the Romantics. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon did not find in their Romantic forebears an aesthetic that was robust enough to communicate the strange truths of the unprecedented catastrophe of the Great War. Owen’s nightmarish landscape finds affinity with Shelley’s dizzying and tragic vision in The Triumph of Life as much as it does with Keats’s fragmented ‘Hyperion’ epics. Equally, Sassoon’s poetry is rounded out with those imaginary landscapes of Keats’s Odes. Both poets were committed Romantics albeit with very tainted sensibilities.