Books: Gentle Poet

NEAR AND FAR—Edmund Blunden— Harper ($2).

The world is full of a number of things, but good poetry is not one of them. In this book of 33 poems, Edmund Blunden illustrates the further fact that good poetry is not necessarily great. Poet Blunden pipes in a minor key, but he pipes well and truly.

Blunden is often classed as of the genus pastoral: his descriptions of English countryside have been likened to Wordsworth. He is a meticulous observer of the outdoors, and couches his observations in many a good old country term. In Near and Far his Muse wanders to Japan and through the War, but she remains, in spite of all temptations, always an English Muse.

And girdled green there bask the plains Where, with his timeless smiles. And mushroom hat, brown Vigour gains His spindling roots, his haulms, his grains— The Oriental Giles. Blunden looks long at familiar things; sometimes his best poetry is the result: Sprawl not so monster-like, blind mist; I know not “seems”; I am too old a realist To take sea-dreams From you, or think a great white Whale Floats through our hawthorn-scented vale— This foam-cold vale. So long and lovingly does he look that when he speaks, he tells of things many a reader’s restless eye may never notice. From love’s wide-flowering mountainside I chose This sprig of green, in which an angel shows.

Edmund Charles Blunden, 33, onetime (1924-27) Professor of English literature at Tokyo University, served in the War with the Royal Sussex Regiment. Great & good friend of Poets Robert Graves, Robert Nichols, with them he lived in the Boar’s Hill poet’s colony (near Oxford) just after the War. Poet Blunden won the Hawthornden Prize in 1922. Other books: The Waggoner, The Shepherd, Masks of Time, Retreat, Undertones of War.