Edmund BlundenRecensioni

1 of 5 volume set. I own 2 volumes from set.

I am very thankful to have reached the end of this. I am studying it for my OU course and would otherwise never have chosen to read it. I appreciated the character of the narrator and his perspective on war in the trenches, but found it slow going, as I had to look up the meaning of so many specialist WW1 and military terms. It was also repetitive and relentless (obviously not to be compared with actually having to live through it) and although I learnt a lot from reading it, it wasn't really an enjoyable experience.

This is a war memoir written by a man with an eye to the natural world. He views the landscape with the eye of someone who can see its potential and how it is ruined and abused causes him almost as much pain as the death of those around him. At times this focus on the natural means that the impact of the war is barely noticeable. Blunden participated in some of the major battles of WW1, and these are described in a very sparse, understated way. At times the horror creeps up on you as it is certainly not overt in the style of writing he adopts. In the introduction it is noted that this can be difficult for the later reader, in that this was almost written with those who were there in mind, not for posterity. We have not experienced anything like what these men went through, and so the gulf between our imagination and their reality is hard to bridge.
It feels wrong to say I enjoyed this based on the subject matter, however I certainly enjoyed his style of observational writing.

The "Britain in Pictures" series, published primarily during World War II, featured many prominent writers and was intended to boost British morale by celebrating English culture and history. This volume, English Villages by poet and author Edmund Blunden, is a fine example of the high quality of these books. Blunden paints a loving portrait of village life: its people, landscape, architecture, and sensibilities. His lyrical prose is accompanied by beautiful illustrations, particularly the full-colour plates.

This is number 17 in the Ariel Poems series and has a lovely front cover illustration, father and son, and a full page winter scene inside. Beautiful little book.

Undertones of War is one of the best known books to emerge from the First World War. Perhaps this is because [a:Blunden|31139|Edmund Blunden|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1335026460p2/31139.jpg] beat [a:Graves|3012988|Robert Graves|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1251049332p2/3012988.jpg] and [a:Remarque|4116|Erich Maria Remarque|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1207351165p2/4116.jpg] to the punch by a year. It is difficult to believe that the exalted position of this rambling, overly fastidious book, owes much to its merits. You come away from this book with little idea of what the war was actually like.

In Britain much of what is generally believed about the First World War comes from the poems, plays, novels, and memoirs it produced (the latter categories indistinguishable in some cases). Particularly, it is from these, and the horribly self-serving [b:War Memoirs|14628906|War Memoirs; Volume I, Part 1|David Lloyd George|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347520561s/14628906.jpg|20273876] of [a:Lloyd George|1278911|David Lloyd George|https://s.gr-assets.com/assets/nophoto/user/m_50x66-82093808bca726cb3249a493fbd3bd0f.png], that the Lions Led by Donkeys interpretation finds its primary evidence.

But while there is much griping about particular regimental officers, there is little of that on display here. There are some harsh words about Third Ypres and it is true that the battle took a heavy toll on British morale. But was Blunden, when writing this criticism, aware of the mutinous state of the French Army? Of the advanced state of collapse of the Russian Army? Of the fact that the battle was little less of an ordeal for its German combatants?

It also worth noting that, like Graves's much superior book, Undertones of War cuts off well before the end of the war - in early 1918. While the experiences of the Somme and Third Ypres are covered at length, the action of 1918 - when the Allied armies won the war - is completely missing. This goes a long way towards explaining why these books give the impression of futility. There is no similar treatment in literature of the battle of Amiens. The men who were there at the war's end in 1918 wrote no memoirs or novels.

Blunden's book is of interest for the student of World War One but, like all these books, their personal focus should always be balanced with a strategic overview.

Of the three classic memoirs of World War 1 by British writers, Blunden's was the most impressionistic, and yet at the same time he describes the most forceful and particular images of the horrors of war. His language and eye are most often pastoral: although he writes that he cannot ride a horse well, he observes the transport mules and horses lined up in life and death several times and writes with equal empathy about the massacres of animals and humans. This memoir has left a deep impression of the horror of trench warfare with me.½

One of the soldier-poets along with Sassoon, Graves, Brooke and Jones. He fought hard and won the Military Cross. He came out of the war with both physical and mental wounds. He did, however, end up living a full life.

A slippery, allusive memoir of the Western Front which resists easy appreciation nowadays – many of its cool ironies and oblique descriptions are, one suspects, aimed more at contemporaries who knew what he was talking about than at future generations struggling to work it out. So, although Blunden was involved in two of the most horrific and iconic encounters of the British war, the Somme and Passchendaele, the overriding impression from this book is of a pastoralist taking note of the changing seasons, the ruined details of village life, songbirds heard at stand-to, fish shoaling in the rivers, light banter between soldiers. On the evidence of this book alone, you'd be forgiven at times for thinking that Third Ypres was an altercation of angry farmers; and when, laconically describing a direct hit on his dugout, Blunden passes over the wounded to note especially the presence of three confused fieldmice at the entranceway, you feel you are getting the essence of the writer.

Already a keen poet when he signed up, Blunden adopts a prose style that is inches away from verse; too often, though, its mannered archaisms get in the way of felt authenticity, at least for a modern reader – at least for me, anyway. Recalling an old farmhouse he stayed in behind the line, for instance, Blunden is moved to this kind of thing:

Peaceful little one, standest thou yet? cool nook, earthly paradisal cupboard with leaf-green light to see poetry by, I fear much that 1918 was the ruin of thee. For my refreshment, one night's sound sleep, I'll call thee friend, ‘not inanimate’…

This ‘not inanimate’ business is a nod to John Clare's ‘The Fallen Elm’, and the whole text is shot through with similar echoes, a few identified, but most, as here, not (though at least here the inverted commas are a clue to flex your memory and/or your Google-fu). At times the references are so strong that he simply delegates to other artists, noting of the trees in No-Man's-Land that their description can be found in Dante, and saying of the trenches at Ypres only that ‘John Nash has drawn this bad dream with exactitude’.

Blunden's effects do often come together well, and at its best this memoir conveys much of the normalcy of trench life that is skipped over by other writers; he gives fascinating little details which I've not seen elsewhere, such as that the ‘smell of the German dugouts was peculiar to them, heavy and clothy’. Still, if you want a referential, poetic reminiscence of the First World War, I'd generally prefer David Jones's even-more-crazily-allusive [book:In Parenthesis|428945], which come to think of it perhaps owes something to Blunden – Blunden, like Jones, sometimes connects the war with wars of legend and history, noting for example that the Old British Line at Festubert ‘shared the past with the defences of Troy’. This is very Jonesian.

And despite the floweriness of some passages, it's the simple lines that get to you. There's a moment near the end, after nearly two years of bucolic Belgian melancholy and ‘sacrificial misery’, when, with companions dropping dead during a gas attack at Zillebeke—

I suddenly remembered, here, that midnight had passed, and this was my twenty-first birthday.

Blunden, who would go on to become a distinguished poet, was commissioned in August 1915 as a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment and served with them right up to the end of World War I, taking part in the actions at Ypres and the Somme, receiving the Military Cross in the process. Blunden's memoir chronicles his experiences and vividly conveys the absurdity, futility, and horrific tragedy of war. The narrative is often repetitive but that may only be reflective of the tedium endemic to trench warfare. Unlike so many of his fellow junior infantry officers, Blunden survived nearly two years in the front line without physical injury. His poems about the war, included in this volume, reflect the emotional and psychological scars of his experiences.

This memoir focused more of the page count on the author's experiences in the trenches. It was written after the fact as he reviewed his diary and letters from the war. One gets the feeling from the book that he decided it was all hopeless early on but he soldiered on bravely to the end of the war nevertheless. While he has a line or two of poetry here or there my copy had a section in the back full of poetry he wrote during the war.

My mother had a copy of this, and so I was pleased to come across it again. Blunden was an admirer of the English country poet John Clare, and helped to make him appreciated again, and Clare's influence can be seen in Blunden's poems. These later poems have much less self-consciously "poetic diction" (deliberately quaint old-fashioned words) than his earlier ones. If you like Edward Thomas you will probably like these. "Thomasine" is a beautiful love story poem that deserves to be better known.

Blunden's Undertones is quiet and brilliant. I had read it quite a few years ago, and at the time didn't, I think, fully appreciate it. For starters, it is a very lyrical, almost pastoral work - if that is at all possible when describing the horrors of the great war.

At the time, I had read Sassoon's memoirs. These are very different, I think; far more conscious of the inner life of the narrator, whereas Blunden's protagonist is more, in a way, externally reflective; he responds to these external, physical, visual moments of the war around him. Sassoon's narrator is more 'squarely' (though not simply) a 'character', one who develops. True enough, Blunden's narrator (himself) does develop, moving clasically from innocence to experience, but it is again a more meditative voice that is always pointing outward, principally at the landscape around him, and the beauties and transformations that occur within and on that landscape.

I read a very dispiriting piece by a poet-critic, who remarked that the Georgians had "failed" to respond adequately to war. I think that the Georgian sentimentality, as well as its lyricism, was quite able to convey the experience of war - in this case its "undertones". Blunden recreates a vision of a natural, organic system that is battered, ruined and neglected by the war. At the same time, he instills it with hope and the potential for regrowth.

And to say that lyricism dominates this book is not to say that it does not convey the horror and brutaility of war; quite the contrary - Blunden's prose and observations - really his experiences - shocked me more than those of Sassoon or Graves. The scene from Pat Barker's 'Regeneration', that leads Billy Prior to a breakdown, was originally a scene from Blunden's 'Undertones'.

4606. Shelley A Life Story, by Edmund Blunden (read 15 Aug 2009) This biography was published in 1946 and is by Edmund Blunden, whose Undertones of War I read 18 May 1973. I did not find this book too interesting, There are no footnotes and no bibliography, and let's face it much of Shelley's heavier poetry is of little interest--I never have read much of, e.g., Prometheus Unbound. The famous shorter poems I like are not made too much of in this book. The closing pages of the book are of interest, but told a bit prosaically. So I confess I was glad to come to the end of his book.

1220. Undertone of War, by Edmund Blunden (18 May 1973) Inspired to read this by a comment by Charles Carrington in his book Soldier From the Wars Returning. I found this a rather arty account of life on the Western Front in World War One. It is by a British officer, and I thought it compared poorly with other WW1 books I had read. But it had striking passages: e.g., "At the moment of midnight, Dec. 31, 1917, I stood with some acquaintances in a camp overlooking the whole Ypres battlefield. It was bitterly cold, and the deep snow all around lay frozen, We drank healths, and stared out across the snowy miles to the line of casual flares, still rising and floating and dropping. Their writing on the night was as the earliest scribbling of children, meaningless; . . .Midnight, successions of colored lights from one point, of white ones from another, bullying salutes of guns in brief bombardment, crackling of machine guns small on the tingling air . . The year 1918 did not look promising at its birth..."

My god, this was tedious. This is always flagged up as being one of the must read WW1 memoirs along with Goodbye to All That etc. I don't know if it was because Blunden was a serious poet or what, but it took me positively ages to get through this, and it's not very long. I found the way he constantly used weird sentence constructions offputting, as they upset the narrative flow. I think underneath it was quite interesting, but I barely noticed.

In this World War One autobiography, 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, describing the latter as "murder, not only to the troops, but to their singing faiths and hopes". 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; it is the only thing which survives the terrible betrayal enacted in the Flanders fields. The author died in 1974.

Simply and outstanding example of this particular genre.