Edmund Blunden and Ivor Gurney

Abstract

Edmund Blunden enlisted in 1914. His war poetry is hard to characterize in that like his poetry as a whole it does not have cohering themes, in the strict sense, so much as contexts and specific experiences. He writes of nature and war, or rather, of events within a rural pattern. Nature is made to contain war, as best it can, as the sanative framework of an otherwise disrupting experience. War impinges on him in a more specific way than nature does and, to this extent, it is more deliberately examined. He sees it as a disrupting force, not merely because it is so intrinsically, but because it interferes with his fruitful contact with nature. Nature provides that kind of assuring context that religion provides for some. In answer to Faustus’s question ‘How comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?’ Mephistophilis replies, ‘Why, this is hell, nor am I out of it.’ Absence from ‘the face of God’ is hell and only an experience such as war could exile the poet from nature as Mephistophilis is exiled from God.