Arts

01 Sep 09

Edmund Blunden

The lead up to Armistice sees Oxford University launch a remarkable new online war poetry collection.

For the first time rare and unseen manuscript material from war author and poet Edmund Blunden have been reassembled from collections in the UK and US, including the Blunden family’s own private collection, and made freely accessible online.

The Edmund Blunden Collection is the latest addition to Oxford University’s First World War Poetry Digital Archive, which enables online users to view over 12,000 previously unseen materials such as poetry manuscripts, letters, and original diary entries from some of the conflict’s most important poets including Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Vera Brittain. 

Highlights of the collection include:

• Extracts from Edmund Blunden’s ‘Minute Book’, a private scrapbook he started to assemble after the war to record and illustrate his experiences.
• Manuscripts from the family’s private collection including letters sent home whilst he was on active service, as well as accounts of dreams, sketches of the trenches made long after the event in a bid to record his understanding of the experiences he went through.
• More than 15 previously unpublished poems from his war service.
• Blunden's account of going over the top with his battalion on the 31st July 1917 in the Third Battle of Ypres, in variants of the chapter The Crash of Pillars from Undertones of War, and in other documents including his poems, his trench diary and an unpublished story.

'Previously, to see these manuscripts you would have had to travel to the US to the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center (HRC) at the University of Texas at Austin – and the items held by the family have remained private to all but the most trusted academic researchers,' said Alun Edwards, researcher for the Archive at Oxford University.

'Through digitisation the project has made these materials accessible to all on the internet. Edmund Blunden was instrumental in bringing the works of Ivor Gurney and Wilfred Owen to the public, and his account of his own experiences as a young officer in the trenches (Undertones of War) stands alongside the fictional accounts of his friends Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves as contemporary and powerful literature – but as a writer his poetry has almost been overlooked and this deserves to be much better known.'

Edmund Blunden’s daughter Margi Blunden says she is delighted that her father’s work is being digitised. She said: 'We are very pleased that the digital archive is including Blunden’s work as it gives him a much deserved profile that has been lacking for many years. Seeing the original manuscripts in this way is a moving experience and we think it will greatly enhance the students' reading of both Undertones of War and his war poetry. In addition it will help readers to understand Blunden's long war experience of nearly two years at the front. We hope the archive will lead to an increased reading and appreciation of his work.'