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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, 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.

Synopsis

Paul Fussell has called Undertones of War an "extended elegy in prose," 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.” 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.

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

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