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    Undertones of War
    Undertones of War
    Undertones of War
    Ebook340 pages4 hours

    Undertones of War

    By Edmund Blunden

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    In a beautifully-rendered memoir of the Great War, the English poet recounts his experiences in the combat zones of France and Flanders.

    Using his gifts as a distinguished poet, Edmund Blunden masterfully shares memories from his service in combat along with the feelings they invoked in him. After enlisting at the age of twenty, he took part in the destructive battles of the Somme, Ypres, and Passchendaele, which he describes as “murder, not only to the troops but to their singing faiths and hopes.”

    Blunden’s autobiography conveys all the horrors of trench warfare, the struggle to comprehend the violence, and the strangeness of observing the war as both a soldier and a poet. With allusive and powerful prose, he conveys the fortitude and despair of his comrades, including the stunning acts of bravery that won him the Military Cross. Although Blunden left the war physically unscathed, he bore mental scars from it for the rest of his life.

    Originally published in 1928, Undertones of War features thirty-two of Blunden’s poems inspired by the war.

    “An extended pastoral elegy in prose. . . . No one disagrees that together with Sassoon’s and Graves’s ‘memoirs’ it is one of the permanent works engendered by memories of the war. . . . It is the sheer literary quality of Undertones of War that remains with a reader.” —Paul Fussell 

    “An established classic.” —D. J. Enright

    “A masterpiece . . . The best English book of its kind.” —Cyrill Falls
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Media
    Release dateJan 1, 2024
    ISBN9781504082358
    Undertones of War
    Author

    Edmund Blunden

    Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) was an English poet, author, and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as professor of poetry at the University of Oxford. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.

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      Undertones of War - Edmund Blunden

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