In what is one of the finest autobiographies to come out of the First World War, the distinguished poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Blunden took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele, describing the latter as 'murder, not only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes'. In his compassionate yet unsentimental prose, he tells of the heroism and despair found among the officers. Blunden's poems show how he found hope in the natural landscape; the only thing that survives the terrible betrayal enacted in the Flanders fields.

Modern Classics Undertones Of War

Literature & Fiction

BLUNDEN, Edmund

Poetry

Penguin Classic

The poet Edmund Blunden records his experiences as an infantry subaltern in France and Flanders. Enlisting at the age of 20, in 1916, he took part in the disastrous battles of the Somme, Ypres and Passchendaele. He tells of the many evidences of endurance, heroism and despair found among the officers and men of his battalion. This volume, which also contains a selection of his war poems, reveals the close affinity which Blunden felt with the natural world. While he laments the loss of optimism, the betrayal of promise and the futility wrought by the war, Blunden finds hope in the natural landscape.

20th Century Undertones Of War

History

Europe

Modern Classics Undertones of War (Penguin Modern Classics)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) was one of the youngest of the war poets, enlisting straight from school to find himself in some of the Western Front's most notorious hot-spots. His prose memoir, written in a rich, allusive vein, full of anecdote and human interest, is unique for its quiet authority and for the potency of its dream-like narrative. Once we accept the archaic conventions and catch the tone―which can be by turns horrifying or hilarious―Undertones of War gradually reveals itself as a masterpiece. It is clear why it has remained in print since it first appeared in 1928. This new edition not only offers the original unrevised version of the prose narrative, written at white heat when Blunden was teaching in Japan and had no access to his notes, but provides a great deal of supplementary material never before gathered together. Blunden's 'Preliminary' expresses the lifelong compulsion he felt 'to go over the ground again' and for half a century he prepared new prefaces, added annotations. All those prefaces and a wide selection of his commentaries are included here―marginalia from friends' first editions, remarks in letters, extracts from later essays, and a substantial part of his war diary. John Greening has provided a scholarly introduction discussing the bibliographical and historical background, and brings his poet's eye to a much expanded (and more representative) selection of Blunden's war poetry. For the first time we can see the poet Blunden as the major figure he was. Blunden had always hoped for a properly illustrated edition of the work, and kept a folder full of possible pictures. The editor, with the Blunden family's help, has selected some of the best of them to include in this new edition.

Undertones of War

OUP Oxford

“I took my road with no little pride of fear; one morning I feared very sharply, as I saw what looked like a rising shroud over a wooden cross in the clustering mist. Horror! But on a closer study I realized that the apparition was only a flannel gas helmet. . . . What an age since 1914!” In Undertones of War, one of the finest autobiographies to come out of World War I, the acclaimed poet Edmund Blunden records his devastating experiences in combat. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the disastrous battles at the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, describing them as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.” All the horrors of trench warfare, all the absurdity and feeble attempts to make sense of the fighting, all the strangeness of observing war as a writer—of being simultaneously soldier and poet—pervade Blunden’s memoir. In steely-eyed prose as richly allusive as any poetry, he tells of the endurance and despair found among the men of his battalion, including the harrowing acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross. Now back in print for American readers, the volume includes a selection of Blunden’s war poems that unflinchingly juxtapose death in the trenches with the beauty of Flanders’s fields. Undertones of War deserves a place on anyone’s bookshelf between Siegfried Sassoon’s poetry and Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That.

University of Chicago Press

Shelley: A Life Story

Folcroft Library Editions

This selection, drawing on a wide range of subject matter, emphasizes Blunden's gift for precise, delicate observation and his mastery of diverse poetic form. His first poem appeared in 1914; The Shepherd in 1922 made his reputation. We can now see him as one of the best Georgians, a man deeply acquainted with that tradition of English poetry which includes Clare-of whose work he was a pioneering editor-and Hardy, and advancing it in his work. Yet the picture that emerges from this edition will unsettle a reader's expectations of the pleasantly pastoral, revealing a poet of quiet authority and haunting imagination. The compiler of this selection, Robyn Marsack, is an editor and translator living in Glasgow. She has also edited a collection of Thomas Bewick's wood-engravings for the Fyfield series.

Edmund Blunden: Selected Poems

Carcanet Press Ltd.

Originally published in 1933, Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries by Edmund Blunden was included in the Cambridge Miscellany series in 1937. It is the 'Miscellany' edition which is re-issued here. The volume was based on the Clark Lectures delivered by the author in Cambridge in 1932 and offers a critical sketch of the English essayist Charles Lamb.

Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries

British & Irish

Cambridge University Press

The Waggoner and Other Poems

BiblioLife

The Bonadventure: A Random Journal of an Atlantic Holiday

Sports & Outdoors

Nabu Press

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