“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.
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 quietauthority 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 in1928.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 thelifelong 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 asubstantial 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 Blundenas 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.
To mark the centenary of the First World War, a Selected Poems of Edmund Blunden brings back into print the work of a major war poet and author of the classic memoir Undertones of War. Edmund Blunden joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, and served in France and Flanders. This selection of his poems includes a substantial sampler of his war verse (the last poem he wrote was on revisiting the battlefields of the Somme). And yet, it is not easy to draw a line between the poems on war and those on other subjects, so deeply did his wartime experience suffuse and haunt his writing. Memories of what was 'shrieking, dumb, defiled' constantly test a vision of 'faith, life, virtue in the sun'. Here is a poet of range and depth deserving of rediscovery.
Ranging from soldiers reading newspapers at the front to authors' responses to the war, this book sheds new light on the reading habits and preferences of men and women, combatants and civilians, during the First World War. This is the first study of the conflict from the perspective of readers.
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