NEW

A Gift to Merton College

By Lucy Edgeley and Frances Marquand Doctor Jerome Mellor boarded a flight from Sydney to London in November 2023 with a bust of Edmund Blunden in his hand luggage. Its destination was Merton College, Oxford. The story needs an explanation! When Jerome, as a boy of...
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An Ypres Christmas by Martin Chown

I really like these extracts from Undertones of War.  Blunden spent two Christmas periods in the Ypres area, and one near Arras in 1918. If you are in the Ieper (Ypres) area of Belgium when it’s winter, there’s nothing better than a dish of Potjevleesch (a light...
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CONTACT

NEW

A Gift to Merton College

By Lucy Edgeley and Frances Marquand Doctor Jerome Mellor boarded a flight from Sydney to London in November 2023 with a bust of Edmund Blunden in his hand luggage. Its destination was Merton College, Oxford. The story needs an explanation! When Jerome, as a boy of...
Read More

An Ypres Christmas by Martin Chown

I really like these extracts from Undertones of War.  Blunden spent two Christmas periods in the Ypres area, and one near Arras in 1918. If you are in the Ieper (Ypres) area of Belgium when it’s winter, there’s nothing better than a dish of Potjevleesch (a light...
Read More
M
Edmund Blunden

Bibliography

His life in Hong Kong was typically no less busy, despite the distance from home. The family had now increased to a total of four daughters: Margaret in 1946, Lucy (1948), Frances (1950) Catherine (1956). From Hong Kong he visited China twice, both times meeting the prime minister, Chou En Lai. He was constantly surrounded by people and memories of the past. The Hong Kong house was always full of students, friends and literary personalities passing through. He made several return visits to England from where he would tour the battlefields of Flanders, visit his old friend Siegfried Sassoon, Christ's Hospital, and his ever widening range of contacts, including lecturing and taking part in literary occasions. In 1956 he was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry, and in 1957 his 'Poems of Many Years' was published, selected and arranged by his long term publisher, Rupert Hart Davis. In 1958 he was created 'Companion of Literature' and wrote 'War Poets 1914-18'. In 1962 he published 'A Hong Kong House', his last major volume of poetry. In 1964 at the age of 67 he retired and returned to England. The family settled in Long Melford, Suffolk, and initially a busy life took shape in the form of talks and lectures, articles and the publication of what would be his final poems. New friendships were also made, one such was with the poet Vernon Scannell. He was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1966. His final poem 'Ancre Sunshine' was written in 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary of the attack on Beaumont Hamel, and illustrates how the Great War haunted him to the end of his life. The year 1967 brought the death of Siegfried Sassoon, and with that the rapid demise of his own health. He resigned his professorship, and put down his pen. Edmund Blunden died on January 20 1974. Private Beeney, his runner at Ypres and Paschendaele attended his funeral, placing a wreath of Flanders poppies in his grave.

This page offers the reader a mere sketch of Blunden’s output. The complexity of the job undertaken by Brownlee Kirkpatrick when she compiled his bibliography will be realised when and if readers are fortunate enough to alight upon her work.

In the meantime we have arranged this page in three sections covering books printed during Blunden’s lifetime and those coming after it, and hope that this will provide enough guidance for those keen to read his work further.

1914 - 1931

1914 October Poems 1913 and 1914 (Horsham: Price & Co.); Poems: translated from the French (Horsham: Price & Co.)

1916 May The Harbingers: poems (Uckfield: ‘to be had of G.A. Blunden’)

1916 June Pastorals: a book of verses (London: E. Macdonald)

1920 August The Waggoner and other poems (London: Sidgwick and Jackson)

1920 November John Clare, Poems Chiefly from Manuscript, edited by Blunden and Alan Porter (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1922 April The Shepherd and other poems of peace and war (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1922 December The Bonadventure – a random journal of an Atlantic holiday ((London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1923 November Christ’s Hospital: a Retrospect, prose (London: Christophers)

1923To Nature: new poems (London: Beaumont Press)

1924 March Christopher Smart, A Song to David, edited by Blunden (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1925 June Masks of Time: a new collection of poems principally meditative (London: Beaumont Press)

1925 September Shelley and Keats: as they struck their contemporaries, edited by Blunden (London: C.W. Beaumont)

1926 January English Poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1927 March On the Poems of Henry Vaughan, an essay and translations of the principal Latin poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1928 May Retreat, poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1928 July Leigh Hunt’s Examiner Examined, an account of the newspaper, extracts and commentary by Blunden (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1928 September Japanese Garland, poems (London: Beaumont Press)
The Autobiography of Leigh Hunt (Oxford World Classics), introduced by Blunden

1928 November Undertones of War: 3 reprints in December, revised edition in November 1930; new preface in the Oxford World Classics edition 1956; new introduction in the Collins edition, 1964

1929 June The Poems of William Collins, edited by Blunden (London: Frederick Etchells & Hugh MacDonald)

1929 September Near and Far: new poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1930 May Leigh Hunt: a biography (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1930 November De Bello Germanico – a fragment of trench history (Hawstead: G.A. Blunden)

1930 December The Poems of Edmund Blunden 1914 – 1930 (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1931 March Sketches in the Life of John Clare, edited by Blunden (London: Cobden-Sanderson); The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Blunden (London: Chatto & Windus)

1931 November Votive Tablets: Studies Chiefly Appreciative of English Authors and Books (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1932 - 1968

A Hong Kong House

1932 March The Face of England, prose (London: Longmans, Green & Co.)

1932 November Halfway House: a miscellany of new poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson)
1933 ‘Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries’, the Clark lectures, Cambridge University Press

1933 January We’ll Shift Our Ground; or, two on a tour, almost a novel, with his second wife, Sylva Norman (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1934 April The Mind’s Eye: essays (London: Jonathan Cape)

1934 November Choice or Chance: new poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1937 November An Elegy and other poems (London: Cobden-Sanderson)

1941 January Poems 1930 – 1940 (London: Macmillan)

1941 September English Villages, prose (London: Collins)

1942 February Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan and Co. Ltd., ‘English Men of Letters’ series)

1944 April Cricket Country, prose (London: Collins)

1944 October Shells by a Stream: new poems (London: Macmillan & Co.)

1946 April Shelley – a life story (London: Collins)

1949 October After the Bombing, and other short poems (London: Macmillan)

1950 September John Keats (London: Longmans, Green, ‘Writers and their Works’ series), revised 1954, 1959, 1966

1950 October Edmund Blunden: a Selection of his Poetry and Prose, edited by  Kenneth Hopkins (London: Rupert Hart-Davis)

1954 September Poems by Ivor Gurney, edited with a memoir by Blunden (London: Hutchinson)

1954 November Charles Lamb (London: Longmans, Green, ‘Writers and their Work’ series), revised 1964

1957 July Poems of Many Years, selected by Rupert Hart-Davis (London: Collins)

1958 July War Poets 1914-1918 (London: Longmans, Green, ‘Writers and their Works’ series); revised 1964

1962 September A Hong Kong House: poems 1951-1961 (London: Collins)

1966 March Eleven Poems (Cambridge: the Golden Head Press)

1968 July The Midnight Skaters: poems for young readers, chosen and introduced by C. Day Lewis (London: The Bodley Head)

1979 onwards

 

1979 Brownlee Kirkpatrick, A Bibliography of Edmund Blunden (Oxford: OUP)

1982 Selected Poems, edited by Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet Press)

1984 Desmond Graham,The Truth of War: Owen, Blunden and Rosenberg (Manchester: Carcanet Press)

1990 Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: a biography (New Haven & London: Yale University Press)

1996 More than a Brother: Correspondence between Edmund Blunden and Hector Buck, 1917-67, edited by Carol Z. Rothkopf (London: Sexton Press)

1996 Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War, edited and introduced by Martin Taylor (London: Duckworth)

1999 Helen McPhail and Philip Guest, Edmund Blunden: on the trail of the poets of the Great War (Barnsley: Pen and Sword Books)

2004 John Greening, Poets of the First World War (London: Greenwich Exchange)

2010 Undertones of War, with an introduction and glossary by Hew Strachan (Penguin Modern Classics)

2011 Margi Blunden, Edmund Blunden: on Rereading Undertones of War (London: Cecil Woolf)

2012 Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919-1967, edited by Carol Z. Rothkopf (London: Pickering and Chatto)

2014 Fall in Ghosts, Selected War Prose, edited and introduced by Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet Press)

2016 Undertones of War, edited by John Greening, with introduction, notes, illustrations and supplementary material (Oxford, OUP)

2018 Selected Poems, edited and introduced by Robyn Marsack (Manchester: Carcanet Press)