Undertones of War

Undertones of War is a 1928 memoir of the First World War, written by English poet Edmund Blunden. As with two other famous war memoirs—Siegfried Sassoon's Sherston trilogy, and Robert Graves' Good-Bye to All That—Undertones represents Blunden's first prose publication,^[1] and was one of the earliest contributors to the flurry of Great War books to come out of England in the late 1920s and early 1930s.^[2]

Undertones of War

Author	Edmund Blunden
Language	English
Genre	Memoir
Publisher	R. Cobden-Sanderson
Publication date	1928
Publication place	United Kingdom

Synopsis

Paul Fussell has called Undertones of War an "extended elegy in prose,"^[3] and critics have commented on its lack of central narrative. Like Henri Barbusse's Under Fire and Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front, the text presents a series of war-related episodes rather than a distinct, teleological narrative.

Reviews

According to Paul Fussell, in Blunden's “writing about horror and violence, understatement delivers the point more effectively than either idealism or heavy emphasis.”^[4] G.S. Fraser, meanwhile, has called the text "the best war poem," despite its prose form, and went so far as to print sections as poetry in the London Magazine.^[5]

References

1. Fussell, Paul (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 310. ISBN 9780195133325.
2. Bostridge, Mark (2014). Vera Brittain and the First World War. London: Bloomsbury. p. 125. ISBN 9781408188446.
3. Fussell, Paul (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 254. ISBN 9780195133325.
4. Fussell, Paul (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 339. ISBN 9780195133325.
5. Fussell, Paul (1975). The Great War and Modern Memory. New York: Oxford University Press. p. 254. ISBN 9780195133325.

External links

• Full text of Undertones of War at Internet Archive