Martin Taylor has collected the best of Blunden’s War poems in Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War (London, 1996), and provided an excellent introduction. This volume also reprints probably the most important of Blunden’s other prose works on the war, ‘A battalion history’. Of the many other pieces on his war experience written by Blunden, the most important are Fall in, Ghosts: An essay on a battalion reunion (London, 1932), and ‘Infantryman passes by’ in George A. Panichas (ed), Promise of Greatness: The war of 1914–1918 (London, 1968).
The best critical introductions to Blunden’s war poetry are to be found in Desmond Graham, The Truth of War: Owen, Blunden, Rosenberg (Manchester, 1984), Jon Stallworthy, Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve soldier poets of the First World War (London, 2002), and John Greening, Student Guide to Poets of the First World War (Billericay, 2004). Helen McPhail and Phillip Guest, On the trail of the poets of the Great War: Edmund Blunden (Barnsley, 1999) provides the fullest guide both to Blunden’s time at the front and to those who wish to retrace his footsteps. Neville Lytton’s The Press and the General Staff (London, 1921) contains an account of the 11th Royal Sussex Regiment, with whom Lytton served before he moved to the Press Bureau, and more regimental background can be found in Keith Grieves’s article on ‘“Lowther’s Lambs”: Rural paternalism and voluntary recruitment in the First World War’, in Rural History, IV (1993), pp 55–75. Barry Webb, Edmund Blunden: A biography (New Haven, 1990) is a full account of Blunden’s life.
A study specifically of Undertones of War, entitled My Father, Edmund Blunden: On re-reading Undertones of War, by Margi Blunden will be published by Cecil Woolf in 2010.