ENGLISH TRENCH POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR AS A DISCURSIVE GENRE
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31861/gph2026.858-859.26-35Keywords:
discourse, discursive strategies, traumatic experience, trench poetry, war discourse, World War IAbstract
The article examines English trench poetry of the First World War as a specific discursive genre within war discourse and analyses the discursive strategies that shape representations of war, heroism, sacrifice and trauma. Drawing on poems by Rupert Brooke, John McCrae, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, the study shows how nomination, predication, argumentation, perspectivisation, mitigation and intensification strategies legitimise or de‑legitimise military action and verbalise traumatic war experience. The research is grounded in the Discourse‑Historical Approach and an interdisciplinary understanding of poetic discourse as a semiotic modelling activity that both reflects and reshapes the author’s cognitive matrix. English trench poetry is treated as a denouncing discursive genre that intervenes in broader war discourse by challenging traditional myths of noble sacrifice and exposing the bodily and psychological costs of industrialised warfare. The article proposes a typology of three subtypes of trench poetry discourse, patriotic, traumatic and satirical, which differ in their focal concepts (HERO, SACRIFICE, DEATH, TRAUMA, MEMORY) and dominant configurations of discursive strategies. Special attention is paid to how sensory concreteness, medicalised lexis, ironic recontextualisation of religious and patriotic formulas and competing perspectives of civilians and frontline participants construct alternative “worlds” of war experience and contribute to cultural memory of the Great War. The analysis demonstrates that trench poetry simultaneously functions as a historical record of frontline experience, a discursive practice of “auth‑therapy” that articulates the traumatic worldview of the “lost generation”, and a counter‑discourse that destabilises legitimising narratives of war in both past and present contexts.
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