Selected Poems

Edmund Blunden, Robyn Marsack

• Publisher: Carcanet Classics
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781784106874
• eBook ISBN:
  9781784106881
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Poetry
• Index: Literature

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.

Notes

SOURCES

These are the books referred to frequently in the notes, in shortened form by initials, title or author.

Other references to information or quoted matter are given in full in the notes.

Edmund Blunden, The Poems of Edmund Blunden 1914–1930 (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930)
EB: notes made in Claire Poynting’s copy of this collection, in ink; also later pencilled emendations, possibly made for a proposed ‘selected poems’. The book is now held in the Blunden Collection of the Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas.

Edmund Blunden, The Shepherd and other poems of peace and war (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1922)
EBS: notes made by EB in this volume; for background see http://www.edmundblunden.org/newsevent.php?newseventid=1162 (accessed 30 March 2018)

Edmund Blunden, Fall In, Ghosts – selected war prose, edited by Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet Press, 2014)

Edmund Blunden, The Deceitful Calm, a new selection of poems, edited by Rennie Parker & Margi Blunden (Holt: Laurel Books, 2006), with useful notes (TDC)

Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War, edited by John Greening (Oxford University Press, 2015), with extensive notes and an additional poetry supplement

Robert Bridges, ‘The Dialectical Words in Edmund Blunden’s Poems’, Society of Pure English tract no. 5, 1921. See http://www.gutenberg.org/files/12524/12524-h/12524-h.htm (accessed 16 March 2018)

John Milton, Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (Oxford University Press, 1969)

Carol Rothkopf, ed., Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 3 vols (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2012)

Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: a biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990)

Joseph Wright, ed., English Dialect Dictionary…, 6 vols (London: Henry Frowde, publisher to the English Dialect Society, 1898–1905)

Drafts and fair copies of some poems, along with other documents and photographs, may be found in the Blunden section of the First World War Poetry Digital Archive – http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

1. Blunden in James Gibson, ed., Let the Poet Choose (London: George Harrap & Co., 1973), p.31.

2. Selected Letters, 1, p.288 (21 June 1930).

3. Blunden, ‘Country Childhood’ in Simon Nowell-Smith, ed., Edwardian England 1901–1914 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), pp.571–2.

4. Webb, Edmund Blunden, p.26.

5. ‘Country Childhood’, p.573.

6. Blunden, ‘De Bello Germanico’, Fall In, Ghosts, p.35.

7. Undertones of War, Chapter VIII; this was in August 1916.

8. According to Rupert Hart-Davis, Robert Graves described Blunden as looking like ‘a cross between Julius Caesar and a bird’; Henry Williamson likened his handwriting to ‘the flight and appearance of that gentle bird [the night-jar]’ (Webb, pp.3–4).

9. Virginia Woolf was among the 35 guests at the dinner for Blunden on the eve of his departure, and noted in her diary for 12 March 1924: ‘Blunden despairing, drooping, crow-like, rather than Keats-like. And did we really all believe in Blunden’s genius? Had we read his poetry? How much sincerity was there in the whole thing?’ (Virginia Woolf, A Moment’s Liberty: the shorter diary, London: Pimlico, 1997, p. 179). She may be referring to Keats as a generic poet-figure; perhaps she may have heard, via Sassoon, of Hardy’s opinion: ‘Edmund Blunden flitted in and out of Max Gate, with his perennial topics of the past war, Christ’s Hospital, cricket, and Keats; he won from Hardy the valued though hardly correct opinion that he had an air of Keats himself’ (Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1980, p.271).

There are various references to Blunden by Woolf in her diaries and letters; in 1929 he was at a party given by the Woolfs along with VW’s nephew, Julian Bell. In her diary for 12 May 1929 Woolf refers to him as ‘little Blunden, the very image of a London house sparrow’ (A Moment’s Liberty, p.259). In a letter to Vita Sackville-West on 13 November 1929, she recounts asking Bell who were the best living poets: ‘He replied at once Vita and Blunden’ (A Reflection of the Other Person: the letters of Virginia Woolf 1929–1931, London, The Hogarth Press, 1978, p. 108). Bell published a volume of poetry, Winter Movement, in 1930, and received ‘a charming letter’ from Blunden, who reviewed the book anonymously for the Times Literary Supplement in 1931 (Peter Stansky & William Abrahams, Journey to the Frontier, Julian Bell and John Cornford: their lives and the 1930 s, London: Constable, 1966, p.71). Bell was to die in Spain in 1937, aged 29, when the ambulance he was driving was bombed by the Nationalists. Ironically, Blunden was one of five to have taken Franco’s side when asked to declare himself in Authors Take Sides on the Spanish Civil War, compiled by his friend and fellow veteran Edgell Rickword (Charles Hobday, Edgell Rickword: a poet at war, Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1989, pp.194–5).

10. Blunden, ‘War and Peace’, Fall In, Ghosts, pp. 47, 46.

11. Eric J. Leed, No Man’s Land: combat and identity in World War I (Cambridge University Press, 1979), p.113 quoting from C.E. Carrington, Soldiers from the Wars Returning (London, 1965), p.252.

12. Edmund Blunden, War Poets 1914–1918, published for the British Council and the National Book League (Harlow: Longmans, Green & Co., 1958; reprinted with additions to the bibliography 1964, 1969), pp.33–4.

13. Selected Letters, 1, p.208 (20 December 1928).

14. Quoted by Webb, p.243.

15. ‘Line upon Line’, The Mind’s Eye, p.112. Blunden wrote that ‘the earliest enjoyment of pictures I can recall came from a brightly tinted Japanese piece of finches on a bough…’, ‘Country Childhood’, pp.551–2.

16. Blunden, Nature in English Literature (London: The Hogarth Press, 1929), p.58. Field mice make a notable appearance in the midst of battle in ‘Third Ypres’: ‘(These / Calmed me, on these depended my salvation.)’

17. Webb, p.318. Blunden unexpectedly won the vote to be Professor of Poetry (succeeding Robert Graves) against Robert Lowell; the American poet wrote him a gracious letter of congratulation.

18. On the day he died, Sassoon read a letter from a soldier who had served with him as a 16-year-old on the Somme. Having heard Sassoon declare ‘I mean to put up a really good show’, his son wrote to the veteran that he felt sure ‘the thoughts in his mind of the old days in the trenches helped him over those last few hours’ (Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: a biography, London: Picador, 2005, p.518). The Great War was there to the end.

19. Letter to Douglas quoted in Desmond Graham, Keith Douglas 1920–1944 – a biography (Oxford University Press, 1974), p.218n. The ‘truth of war’ and the idea of fighting poets as the only writers able to convey it are discussed in the essay ‘Going over the ground again’ at the end of this volume.

NOTES TO THE POEMS

1 ‘By Chanctonbury’

Written in 1915, first published in Pastorals, a book of verses (London: Erskine Macdonald, June 1916). Chanctonbury is a hill on the South Downs, in West Sussex. It is the site of a prehistoric hill-fort, Chanctonbury Ring, and used to be crowned with beech trees (mainly destroyed in the storms of 1987).

2 ‘The Festubert Shrine’

EB: It was a pretty little chapelle. Festubert had not many antiquities. But it had the air of a comfortable old village, with plenty of good trees and gardens.

EB writes wistfully in the Preface to Poems ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• Acknowledgements
• from Pastorals (1916)
• Early poems from Poems 1914–1930 (1930)
• The Waggoner and other poems (1920)
• The Shepherd and other poems of peace and war (1922)
• To Nature (1923)
• Masks of Time (1925)
• English Poems (1926)
• Retreat (1928)
• Undertones of War (1928)
• Near and Far (1929)
• Later poems from Poems 1914–1930 (1930)
• To Themis (1931)
• Halfway House (1932)
• Choice or Chance (1934)
• An Elegy and other poems (1937)
• On Several Occasions (1939)
• Poems 1930–1940 (1941)
• Shells By a Stream (1944)
• After the Bombing and other short poems (1949)
• Poems of Many Years (1957)
• A Hong Kong House: poems 1951–1961 (1962)
• Eleven Poems (1965)
• ‘Going over the ground again’: the poetry of witness
• Notes
• Index of First Lines
• About the Authors
• Also by Edmund Blunden from Carcanet Press
• Copyright