The Poetry of Blunden by Edmund Blunden
"The Poetry of Blunden" refers to the body of work created by Edmund Blunden, an English poet and scholar whose writings are characterized by their contemplative and nostalgic tone. Blunden's poetry often explores themes of the English countryside and rural life, reflecting a deep appreciation for nature, which he views with both affection and a sense of impending chaos. His war poetry, while addressing the grim realities of combat, maintains a sense of restraint and focuses more on the human experience and brotherhood among soldiers than on the violence and social critique prevalent in the works of contemporaries like Wilfred Owen.
Blunden’s style is formal and evokes influences from earlier poets such as Milton, yet he retains a distinctive voice that conveys both the beauty of domestic life and the inevitability of destruction. His poems, such as "The Survival" and "A Country God," illustrate this juxtaposition between tranquility and turmoil, highlighting the contrast between the serene English landscape and the horrors of war. Blunden's later work reflects a nostalgic look back at past experiences, intertwining his love for the countryside with a poignant awareness of loss. Through his verse and prose, including his study of English nature poetry, Blunden emerges as a significant, though often underappreciated, voice in the literary canon, blending traditional poetic form with deeply personal and societal reflections.
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The Poetry of Blunden by Edmund Blunden
First published:Pastorals: A Book of Verse, 1916; The Shepherd and Other Poems of Peace and War, 1922; English Poems, 1925; Retreat, 1928; Near and Far, 1929; Poems of Edmund Blunden, 1914-1930, 1930; Halfway House, 1930; Halfway House, 1932; Choice and Chance, 1934; Poems, 1930-1940, 1940; New Poems, 1945; Poems of Many Years, 1957
Critical Evaluation:
Edmund Blunden is a poet and scholar not widely known despite the considerable body of work to his credit both in verse and prose. His concern with describing English countryside and country life, his contemplative and nostalgic mood, the restraint and even temper of the verse have run a quiet course beneath the experiments, the probing of self and society, the symbolic achievement, of the major modern poets. Even Blunden’s war poems keep a restraint, a tone of both matter of factness and of pity which seldom approaches the work of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, or of Randall Jarrell, in violent imagery, anguished and angry outcry, bitter irony and social protest. His images are brutal enough, and shocking, but are presented more as a matter of sad fact, inevitability, than to shock the reader into a realization of the horror of combat. It is man’s pitiable attempts at heroism compared to the brute forces of destruction, which is Blunden’s theme, rather than the causes of the war, and the questionable ends it serves. In later years, Blunden looks back at his war experience, and, as many others have done, he feels a mixture of awe and sadness that such momentous events could be past, covered, swept away and all but forgotten.
Some of his poems contribute a major clue to Blunden’s attitude toward war. While, of course, detesting the whole bloody business, particularly the waste of static trench warfare wherein, as he explains in his classic prose work, UNDERTONES OF WAR, suicide raids were carried out only to straighten a line on a map, Blunden’s deepest feelings are reserved for the men he came to know and love under the enforced, close fellowship of combat. Under such inhuman conditions, the human virtues of kindness and brotherliness become absolute values.
In the war poems, and in UNDERTONES OF WAR, Blunden describes the everyday feelings and even the small, delicious diversions of men caught in the military mill. He never attempts to raise his voice above the crash of battle. UNDERTONES is remarkable for its quietly earnest and honest depiction of the whole range of military life.
Blunden’s verse is essentially a formal, even stately, poetry, and the inversions of word order as well as the diction are often reminiscent of Milton and even more so of the eighteenth century nature poets, Thomson and Collins.
For all the traditional flavor of his verse, both in form and content, there is another side, or depth, to Blunden. Born perhaps in the war, and certainly brought to the full there, is his sense of impending, inevitable destruction. It is this foreboding, underlying the domestic exterior of everyday life, that gives Blunden’s poems their bite. This deeper note is usually caught in a style which has an abruptness and natural strength which, while controlled by traditional formalism, gives him a disarmingly distinctive voice. This quality is well illustrated in a poem such as “The Survival”; others, such as “The Midnight Skaters” or “The Pike,” for example, might serve as well. Whether set in a war zone or in rural Sussex, Blunden’s sense of inevitable chaos lurking beneath the surface, or impending, is expressed. So is his respect for those who live on despite this fact, whether they are like those midnight skaters who “dance on this ball-room thin and wan,” whirling carelessly over the dark waters of death just beneath, or those soldiers who, appalled and sick to death, still manage to treat their fellows with kindness and love.
There is an echo of Hardy in Blunden’s poetry, not of the Hardy who dwells on the callousness of nature, on men as blind victims of chance or outright malevolence, but of the Hardy who portrays the rough common life of earth and applauds those who can endure it.
Blunden’s ability to depict domestic experience vividly goes beyond that of the Georgian Poets. Younger than most of them, he is in his poetry more individualistic, less given to their artifices and even affectations. “The Mole-Catcher” describes a trapper at work, who brutally kills moles but who is kind to all other animals, who is a good fellow and the bell-ringer of the local church. Blunden is neither satiric nor bitterly ironic here; he simply underscores how cruelty quite naturally is part of regular and peaceful lives.
Reminding one a bit of Gibson or Munro, Blunden is less whimsical and ironic, more starkly (though he would detest the use of the word) matter-of-fact.
It should be clear that Blunden’s poems about English country life are not merely pastoral, escapist pieces. Everywhere is the note of life seen as momentary and as downright as it is in the trenches, though country life, as is evident in UNDERTONES OF WAR, provides moments of beauty and tranquillity which are to be grasped and cherished. One of Blunden’s most remarkable poems, both for its vigorous, earthy style and its expression of the gap which separates normal country peace and war or other catastrophe, is “A Country God.” The old English countryside, loved for its natural self and readily imagined as peopled with Pan and other mythic folk, is now a wasteland; the English pastoral has become a grim, muscular poem of modern destruction. The love of the old, of the prewar past, is a theme which occurs with increasing frequency in Blunden’s poetry, and his later verse becomes mellow, solemn, retrospective. Even the war itself becomes a source of nostalgia.
Blunden’s literary activities are not restricted to poetry. He collected and edited the tangled thickets of John Clare’s verse, and he has published studies of Collins, Hardy, Lamb, Shelley, and Vaughan, among others. His survey of English nature poetry, NATURE IN ENGLISH LITERATURE is limited in scope but reveals Blunden’s admiration for the eighteenth and nineteenth century tradition of nature poetry and worship. His own writing is deeply rooted in a profound love of the English countryside and of the peculiar quality of the poetry which that love has produced from Thomson to Arnold. It is very British. The peculiarity of this verse and attitude is explained by Blunden as being due to nature loved both for its variegated actuality and for its capability of sustaining personification. According to Blunden, the ability to see both the natural fact and also a personification of a classical deity is the strength of English nature poetry.
To charge that this view is attenuated Romanticism is not quite just; it is a Romanticism severely tempered by war and a new society. Nonetheless, the common and lasting beauties of nature—of tree, bird, meadow—give evidence to the sensitive observer of an essential order and wholesomeness nothing can quite eradicate. Some such conviction, or feeling, would appear to be Blunden’s rooted faith, which he has articulated in verse and prose, and in a voice at once muted and distinctive.