Jan. 20, 1974— The poet, biographer, critic, and travel writer Edmund Blunden, died at age 77 at his longtime home in Long Melford, England, mourned by intimates in academe and beyond for his sensitivity, wry sense of humor and fanatical love of cricket.
But the experience that colored his entire adult life
was indicated by what lay atop his coffin: poppies from Flanders, Belgium, the
WWI battleground where he fought nearly 60 years before and wrote about, in a
searing memoir and poetry that sought to evoke the pastoral landscapes marred
by the carnage.
Six nominations for the Nobel Prize in Literature
testify to high esteem from the literary community during Blunden’s lifetime.
Nowadays, he belongs to the type of understudied
figures whose reputations he tried to elevate as a critic, such as William
Collins, William Cobbett, Robert Southey, Thomas Hood, and Michael Drayton.
A stone inscription in Westminster Abbey’s Poets
Corner, installed in 1985, points to the greatest claim for his importance: his
listing among 16 “Great War Poets.”
I have blogged before about this group, either
focusing on individuals (Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves) or the larger group of creative artists struggling with the violence, carnage and
shock to civilization created by the conflict.
But Blunden—who enlisted and became an intelligence
officer at only age 19, and won the Military Cross for “his conspicuous
gallantry” during the Battle of the Somme—deserves his own extensive discussion.
While in the service the longest of these poets, he
was also, according to one of his friends from this group, Siegfried Sassoon,
his friend, the one most enduringly obsessed by it.
Not only did he witness the deaths of countless
comrades and the dissolution of his unit, the 11th Battalion of the Royal
Sussex regiment, because of all these casualties, but in the 1917 Passchendaele
offensive, he was gassed.
This new form of chemical warfare left victims like
Blunden with temporarily impaired eyesight and irritated skin. Worst, it
blistered his throat and lungs, considerably aggravating his asthma.
For the rest of his life, Blunden would be plagued by
nightmares from his wartime service. His daughter Margi, trained in counseling,
said in a March 2014 Oxford Mail interview that she believed her
father suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder:
“The dreams never stopped and he continued to feel
guilt about having survived. But he had no treatment for it at all.”
At first, Blinden set aside his attempt at chronicling
these wartime horrors, De Bello Germanico. It was only several years
later, in the mid-1920s, in Japan (where he was teaching English at the Tokyo
Imperial Museum), that he had sufficient physical distance and psychic space to
write Undertones of War in 1928.
Privately, Blunden had been dismayed to find that Graves
had exaggerated elements of his own wartime experience in Goodbye to All
That. It was all the more imperative, then, that after Undertones of War
was published, Blunden felt compelled to correct any mistakes for its second
edition.
It was miraculous that he was able to record and
remember as much as he did. Blunden’s creative work had been hampered from the
start by the extreme difficulties of writing while the war raged. Blunden lost
a number of his poems, for instance, amid the chaos of troop movements and
trench warfare. In addition, his PTSD disrupted recollections of painful
deaths.
Emily Dickinson defined the mission of the poet to “Tell
the truth but tell it slant.” Blunden managed to “tell it slant” by evoking elements
of pastoral poetry.
The style of Undertones of War evokes the kind
of landscapes that Blunden had cherished since childhood, with archaic phrases
(often switching word order) reminiscent some of his favorite poets like Thomas
Hardy and John Clare:
“Acres of self-sown wheat glistened and sighed as we
wound our way between, where rough scattered pits recorded a hurried firing-line
of long ago. Life, life abundant sang here and smiled; the lizard ran warless
in the warm dust; and the ditches were trembling with odd tiny fìsh, in worlds
as remote as Saturn.
Though modern readers may be startled by this very unusual
language, it enabled Blunden to underscore the damage to the natural landscape
and ancient traditions that this brutally modern war represented—a contrast
equally apparent in his poem “The Zonnebeke Road”:
Piteous and silly; the stones themselves must flinch
In this east wind; the low sky like a load
Hangs over, a dead-weight. But what a pain
Must gnaw where its clay cheek
Crushes the shell-chopped trees that fang the plain –
The ice-bound throat gulps out a gargoyle shriek.”
Throughout Undertones of War and his war poetry, Blunden paid continual tribute to the comrades he likened to a family. His subsequent memories are filled with a survivor’s guilt.
“Why slept I not in Flanders clay/With all the
murdered men?” he wrote. He could not be buried with “Flanders clay,” but his
coffin contained what may have meant more to him: poppies symbolizing the
renewal of life in the face of the horrors.
(For an interesting discussion of how closely Blunden
engaged with books—including war correspondent Mary Augusta Ward’s 1919 account,
Fields of Victory—see Alexis Voisard’s blog post on the Edmund Blunden
Collection in the Ohio Universities Library.)
No comments:
Post a Comment