Selected Poems

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.

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) grew up in Kent and went to school in Sussex at Christ’s Hospital; these were the formative landscapes of his boyhood. He joined the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915, serving in France and Flanders. His collection The Shepherd (1922) made his reputation as a poet; his classic account of his military service, Undertones of War (1928) was written while he was teaching in Japan. He made his living by writing and editing, with two extended periods of teaching: as a Fellow of Merton College 1931–42, and as Professor of English at the University of Hong Kong 1953–64. He received the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1956, and was Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford 1966–68. His passions were poetry, book collecting, cricket, and the English countryside; he was haunted by his war experience all his life.

Robyn Marsack edited the first edition of Edmund Blunden’s Selected Poems in 1982. She became Director of the Scottish Poetry Library 2000-2016 and was a Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow at the University of Glasgow 2016-2018.