EDMUND BLUNDEN - OVERTONES OF WAR

Image: Flanders fields

My uncle has learned that I’m moving to Belgium. In Belgium there are many places where the battles of WWI were contested, and for this reason he sent me a reading list focused around the war. I picked up this book first from his list because it seemed similar to Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (probably my favorite memoir). It is similar in that both books are written by poets. The poetic soul shines through. Blunden’s account is often compelling, and there’s no denying his art as a stylist. However, while reading Overtones I became aware that there was a collection of Blunden’s wartime poetry tacked on to the end. This shaded my reading in a certain way. I began to suspect — and note times in the narrative, when Blunden speaks about writing during the war, even receiving notices of publication on the front — that the entire narrative might be an elaborate advertisement for Blunden’s own poetry. It affected my enjoyment. Because I also suspected that I wouldn’t like Blunden’s poems very much. My suspicions were correct. The poems didn’t connect with me, though I’m sure they do with other readers. Read, February 2020.