Edmund Blunden

A poetry anthology edited by Brian Gardner, and first published in 1964. It was a thematic collection of the poetry of World War I. A significant revisiting of the tradition of the war poet, writing in English, it was backed up by strong biographical research on the poets included. Those were mainly British and Irish combatants of World War I; but there are also Australian, Canadian and American poets. The poems are arranged roughly in chronological order, from the start of the war to the end. Some contemporary poems by major poets not involved in the fighting are also given. The title of the anthology comes from the Siegfried Sassoon poem Base Details.

This selection of prose about the First World War includes the complete text of De Bello Germanico, his first, lively sketch of the war as he lived it in 1916, alongside other essays and reflections. Deeply informed by his reading of eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature, and equally by his knowledge of the countryside, Blunden's prose summons up what was human and natural in that most unnatural of environments, the battlefields of the Western Front.--From back cover.