Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden

Undertones of War by Edmund Blunden

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) grew up in Kent and went to school in Sussex at Christ's Hospital; these were the formative landscapes of his boyhood. He joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, serving in France and Flanders. His collection The Shepherd (1922) made his reputation as a poet; his classic account of his military service, Undertones of War (1928) was written while he was teaching in Japan. He made his living by writing and editing, with two extended periods of teaching: as a Fellow of Merton College 1931-42, and as Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong 1953-64. He received the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1956, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford 1966-68. His passions were poetry, book collecting, cricket, and the English countryside; he was haunted by his war experience all his life.

Robyn Marsack edited the first edition of Edmund Blunden's Selected Poems in 1982. She became Director of the Scottish Poetry Library 2000-2016 and was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Glasgow 2016-2018.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780226061764
ISBN 10	0226061760
Title	Undertones of War
Author	Edmund Blunden
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The University of Chicago Press
Year published	2007-11-01
Number of pages	250
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.