This choice was partially responsible for his falling out of fashion in the 1930s. Back in England, he found disfavour with the critics. Michael Roberts, whose Faber Book of Modern Verse (1936) shaped the taste of a generation or more, excluded him from the anthology (along with Edward Thomas) as one of those who had written good poems but had not ‘been compelled to make any notable development of poetic technique’.37 In New Bearings in English Poetry, F.R. Leavis had dealt with this point in praising Blunden’s distinctive poise: ‘He was able to be, to some purpose, conservative in technique and to draw upon the eighteenth century, because the immemorial rural order that was doomed is real to him.’ Leavis, however, censured Blunden’s more recent poetry for being on the one hand too hospitable to ‘nymphs and their attendant classicalities’ and on the other, too directly descriptive of his ‘unease, his inner tensions, instead of implying them, as before, in the solidity of his created world.’38 Perhaps, with over 300 pages of Poems 1914–1930 before him, in a thematic arrangement, it was not easy to see how distinctive Blunden’s expression of unease in his solid but haunted world remained.
In the present selection, the war predominates as it did in Blunden’s own life. That he could write graceful, playful poetry is evident – as in the poems here from Choice or Chance and An Elegy, for example – and that he could write poetry of sudden illumination, of solace in nature, as in ‘The Kiss’ (‘I am for the woods against the world’) and in love (‘The Surprise’). There were poems in the 1930s that paid homage to the poets he loved, and poems rejoicing in books and cricket. Nevertheless, there was the long shadow of the approaching war.
The Great War had only recently been allotted its unassailable ground, in the sense that the war graves were by then in their immaculate order. In 1936 Blunden had been asked to join the Imperial War Graves Commission, in succession to Rudyard Kipling, and he regularly went back to the battlefields and cemeteries. Blunden later wrote the foreword to a history of the Commission, and said he saw the cemeteries as a commemoration of those who had ‘died for their friends’ and that they were ‘in a sense the poetry of that action’.39 All he desired was that there should not be another war, and thus his visits to Germany, his close relationship with his German sister-in-law, inclined him to take a naively positive view of Hitler’s rise to power, and to say so.40 By mid-1940 he was back in uniform, with an honorary commission in the Oxford OTC, and instructing soldiers in map-reading. One of his pupils at Merton was Keith Douglas, an Old Blue to whom he became a mentor despite their very different temperaments and styles, as keen to get to a war as Blunden was to avoid one. He was killed by an exploding shell in Normandy in 1944, aged 24. The older man was convinced, as he wrote to Douglas, that ‘the fighting man in this as in other wars is at least the only man whom truth really cares to meet.’41
In his 1928 essay on ‘Siegfried Sassoon’s Poetry’, Blunden had written about the ‘searing colloquial verses of desperation’ in Counter-Attack, published in May 1918.
In these Satanically laughable conditions of human misunderstanding (and here I write from a particular hatred of the period and the agonies of the Passchendaele illusion), a poet was found with the strength of mind to sacrifice everything, even the traditions of poetry […] in order that he might make audible and intelligible in England and elsewhere the weeping Truth:
He went and said it very clear,
He went and shouted it in their ear.42
Blunden’s formulations of the relationship of truth to combat experience, and thus to the writing that comes out of war, touches on a critical issue: are the ‘truth of war’ and the ‘truth of poetry’ compatible? Is there a ‘true war poetry’? Douglas mulled over these questions in ‘Poets in this War’, in 1943. Hell ‘was let loose in the Great War and it is the same old hell now’, he wrote:
The hardships, pain and boredom; the behaviour of the living and the appearance of the dead, were so accurately described by the poets of the Great War that every day on the battlefields of the western desert – and no doubt on the Russian battlefields as well – their poems are illustrated. Almost all that a modern poet on active service is inspired to write would be tautological. […] Their experiences they will not forget easily, and it seems to me that the whole body of English war poetry of this war, civil and military, will be created after the war is over.43
So he is already thinking that the truth will emerge in retrospect; pragmatically, too, because ‘the mobility of modern warfare does not give the same opportunities for writing as the long routines of trench warfare.’ Not forgetting has not quite – given Douglas’s energetic mindset – become an inability to forget.
Twenty years later, the discussion was revived with the publication of the Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Cecil Day Lewis and reprinting Blunden’s Preface to the 1931 edition, on which he had spent so much effort. Blunden wrote to Sassoon specifically about Philip Larkin’s review. The younger poet maintained that because war poets were reactive to the circumstances in which they found themselves they could not be regarded as the highest practitioners of an art where the subject should be actively chosen: ‘the first-rank poet should ignore the squalid accident of war: his vision should be powerful enough to disregard it… [war] is essentially irrelevant.’44 This is an echo of W.B. Yeats and his notorious rejection of ‘the trench lyric’ from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, dismissing Owen and other war poets on the grounds that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’.
I was questioning Larkin’s rule that we should, as ‘first-rank poets,’ leave out the war we are deeply discussing in poetry. Something is there, something strange occurs there – not in Utopia. Agreed that we must not crowd the communication with dictionary terms […] Poems are surely moments of vision. I was back in Zillebeke and at Dikkebusch Vijver as I wrote the last sentence, and saw both in the gloom and the beauty of two calendars.45
‘Poems are surely moments of vision’: here is the truth of poetry, which can include but not be limited to ‘trench realism’.46 Such a poem is Blunden’s ‘Pillbox’ (p.61), which is centred on an incident rendered in casual speech, yet includes the line ‘the ship of Charon over channel bore him’. At once we feel its weight and relevance. The poet’s art enables him to combine the classical image of crossing that deep river which separates a man from his living comrades with the moment’s recognition that the soldier will not be ferried home across the English Channel with a lucky, ‘blighty’ wound. The soldier, literally scared to death, moves out of the day’s news and joins the long line of the immemorial dead.
What Larkin did not take into account, although he did greatly admire Owen, was that the war, far from being ‘a squalid accident’ became a condition of mind for many participants and survivors, not a passing circumstance that would find its place in the continuum of a life. Continuity and discontinuity are central ideas in discussions not only of the pastoral but also of what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder. Undoubtedly Blunden suffered from trauma – or shell shock, as it was then labelled – after his service in the First World War. ‘Shell shock’ is defined by Jay Winter as ‘a condition in which the link between an individual’s memory and his identity is severed’; ‘the sense of having an integral personality, one with a then and a now which flowed together, becomes uncertain because of what he has felt and seen.’47 Winter suggests that shell shock ‘is a theatre of memory out of control’; ‘before’ and ‘after’ the event of war is not a linear but a circular concept. Despite the anchor of his country childhood, Blunden was condemned to this circling, and it had become his poetic subject.48
Robert Graves omitted a passage about Blunden in the 1957 revision of his memoir Goodbye to All That (a book Blunden and Sassoon regarded as a betrayal of their war experience), referring to their conversations in Oxford in 1919:
Edmund had war-shock as badly as myself, and we would talk each other into an almost hysterical state about the trenches. We agreed that we
would not be right until we got all that talk on paper. He was first with Undertones of War.49
Graves was mistaken in thinking that it could all be made ‘right’ with one book, at least for Blunden. An element of control was provided by writing about the experience within the continuities provided by literary tradition, but the dreams never stopped,50 and the asthma and the dependence on alcohol remained; his traumatic experience was never treated. His daughter Margi, writing about their family life, remembers that he often talked about the places and men:
By the time I was a teenager I was familiar with the names Ypres, Poperinghe, Hill 60, Zillebeke, Festubert, Jacob’s Ladder, etc. And the men – Tice, Collyer, Vidler, Amon, Worley… So whilst I was living my teenage years in the colourful and beautiful environment of the colony of Hong Kong, at Sunday lunch he might be talking about Flanders. […] it was as if, like the Ancient Mariner, he could not help but speak about it […]51
This is not simply reminiscence, it is inhabiting the experience, ‘going over the ground again’. The psychiatrist W.H. Rivers, who was so important in the treatment of traumatised soldiers at Craiglockhart, the Edinburgh hospital where Sassoon and Owen first met in 1917, was convinced that narration, not repression, was the key to recovery: ‘subliminal memories were worse, because they never let go.’52 And yet ‘narrative’ was itself compromised by the experience, because it could not be absorbed into a clear ‘then’ and ‘now’ sequence. A poem such as ‘The Branch Line’ (p.113) shows how easily the pleasures of the present give way to the apprehensions of the past, which may also signal the future.
One of the many ironies of this formative experience was the attachment to it, consciously or unwillingly. It came back in dreams, as reproach, and as odd as it seems to us now, as security and happiness. If the reproach is connected with survival, the happiness comes with the reminders of comradeship and trust.53 ‘Reunion in War’ (p.34) makes it plain that human relations, beyond those with fellow soldiers, could not touch a man – ‘We had not met but a moment ere / War baffled joy’ – and that surviving those comrades was, immediately after the war, a cause of terrible guilt: ‘[I] knew for all my fear to die / That I with these lost friends should lie’ (‘War Autobiography’). In Tim Kendall’s terrific formulation, ‘A war poem represents the partial victory of unholy joy over shame.’54 The living poet is still able to create, although wracked by survivors’ guilt: the lasting poem is built on dead men’s bones.
The idea of being what the philosopher Avishai Margalit calls in The Ethics of Memory a ‘moral witness’ is pertinent here, a state that he defines as ‘knowledge-by-acquaintance of suffering’, separating the witness from the observer or the victim. The difficulty is that such a witness has ‘to live in order to serve’, establishing not only the facts but what it means to be marked by them. He describes not only the war itself, but the memory and effect of war. Such spokesmen belong to a group which has also been through the fire – thus Blunden’s annual attendance at his battalion reunions, and his deep friendships with veterans, pre-eminently Sassoon; they provide what Margalit calls a ‘thick identity’, based on shared bonds.55 Naming was crucial: soldiers’ names and place names in the poems; dates, too – all the identifying tags, ‘lest we forget’. Eric J. Leed, in his persuasive study No Man’s Land, maintains that trench warfare provided ‘an environment that can never be known abstractly or from the outside’ and quotes Charles Carrington’s brutal declaration: ‘I could not escape from the comradeship of the trenches which had become a mental internment camp.’56 The effort to make outsiders – non-combatants, new generations – understand is crucial to the moral witness, at the same time as it is felt to be an impossible task.57
This is key to Blunden’s return to the subject, in the 1940s’ poems such as ‘Company Commander, 1917’ (p.127), ‘The Vanishing Land’ (p.133), ‘The Halted Battalion’ (p.137). It is key to his work on Wilfred Owen’s poems in 1930, and his editing of Ivor Gurney’s poems, mostly from unpublished manuscripts, in 1954. Blunden visited Gurney at Dartford Asylum, and wrote self-revealingly about him in the context of the unharmed countryside close to the front line:
Add to this that Gurney […] was with men of his own shire, in whom a like tradition and similar ability were personified, and we may see how this passage of his life as a soldier became a deep delight to him. When we observe that with it were mingled the extreme horror and futility of his battlefield days and nights, we apprehend the whole force of the period as it fastened on his imagination; and this also became even a tyranny over his later poetry.58
Blunden wrote the widely read pamphlet on First World War poets published by the British Council in 1958, and the Foreword to Brian Gardner’s influential anthology, Up the Line to Death, in 1964, among many such introductions. Dominic Hibberd suggested that as ‘critic, editor and academic’, Blunden ‘probably had more influence than anyone on the modern view of 1914–18 verse’.59 If he did not bring these poets before the reading public, he was unfaithful to the dead; not only to their suffering but also to their truths.
Blunden’s most anthologised poem, ‘Report on Experience’ (p.94), which begins ‘I have been young, and now am not too old; / And I have seen the righteous forsaken’ was published when he was 33. For the next forty years he never let go of the whole experience – or, it never let go of him – as we see in his last poem. It is as a poet, surely, that he would wish to be remembered and deserves to be read: an English poet, particularly of Kent and Sussex, in love with the English language and its poetic traditions; a pastoral poet, who felt time and the seasons on his pulse as he looked over his shoulder, painted their passing beauties and their harshness; a soldier-poet, who has left us the truth of his remembrance of peace and war, those nearly inseparable experiences.
Robyn Marsack
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, e
d., 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).
Selected Poems Page 14
