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]
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
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