Status
Available
Call number
Collection
Publication
Penguin Books Ltd (1992), Edition: New Ed, Paperback, 288 pages
Description
A beautifully illustrated edition of Edmund Blunden's rich prose memoir. John Greening couples the original and unrevised version of the text with the best of Blunden's own annotations, commentaries, and illustrations. "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."--Jacket… (more)
User reviews
LibraryThing member DuneSherban
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
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'.
At the time, I had read
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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'.
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LibraryThing member Widsith
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
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.
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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.
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LibraryThing member Carrifex
Simply and outstanding example of this particular genre.
LibraryThing member Chris_El
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
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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. Show Less
LibraryThing member Sullywriter
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.
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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. Show Less
LibraryThing member nmele
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
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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. Show Less
LibraryThing member Helenliz
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
It feels wrong to say I enjoyed this based on the subject matter, however I certainly enjoyed his style of observational writing.
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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.
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LibraryThing member bowlees
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.
LibraryThing member pgchuis
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
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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. Show Less
Subjects
Language
Original publication date
1928-11
Physical description
288 p.; 7.72 inches
ISBN
0140182950 / 9780140182958