The guns of August fell silent almost 90 years ago, only to be supplanted by bigger and deadlier guns over the intervening decades; but for many of those who survived the trenches of the Great War, the shrill rumble of incoming artillery never stopped reverberating, even in – perhaps especially in – outwardly placid settings. The leafy elms and rural sheepfolds of the English countryside, though itself untouched by the war, would ever after be shot through with nightmare flashes.

Edmund Blunden, not much read today, was one of the poets who tasted to the full the acrid disparity between seeming peace and the remembered presence of war. All his most memorable poems, and much of his prose, explore this irony. Blunden spent two years in the trenches, longer than any of his friends and fellow-poets, such as Robert Graves or Siegfried Sassoon. But in a certain cruel sense, Blunden never escaped from no-man’s-land. The barbed wire festooned with charred corpses, the ubiquitous stinking mud, the ravaged villages of Belgium haunted his dreams and his imagination until his death in 1974.

It’s surprising to recall that he died just over 30 years ago; his poetry, with its deliberately mannered diction, had long seemed to belong to a much earlier age. It is even more surprising to realize that he exerted a strong influence on such quintessentially modern poets as Ted Hughes. And, in fact, Blunden is an unusually subtle poet; because his poems, whether written under fire or long afterward, deploy time-honored tropes and Augustan modes, they seem, at first glance, somehow inadequate to their subject matter. Wilfred Owen, whom Blunden first made known to a wider public, has overshadowed him. Owen’s fury and disgust throb from the page and toll in those savage rhymes and off-rhymes he was to make so signally his own, as in his “Anthem for Doomed Youth”:

What passing bells for these who died as cattle? -Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Blunden’s war poems are weirdly quiet; their power tends to grow in the mind over time. The oddly fussy diction then comes to seem horribly apposite for the monstrosity of the events he memorializes. It was Paul Fussell in his magisterial study “The Great War and Modern Memory” (Oxford, 368 pages, $19.95) who first pointed out that, in fact, Blunden’s manner, and his mannerisms, represented an oblique but no less savage indictment of the senselessness of the Great War. Every “archaic” turn of phrase in the verse by poignant implication suggested the magnitude of loss. We today can hardly imagine the extent of this loss. At the Third Battle of Ypres, which began on July 31, 1917, and which Blunden somehow got through, there were more than 250,000 British casualties, all for a gain of seven miles; this was only one of the major butcheries of the war.

Blunden’s strategy, so to speak, is to evoke pastoral pursuits and the lost English countryside, almost obsessively, amid the dread and terror of the trenches. Here is how he ends “A Country God,” written in 1918:

But now the sower’s hand is writhed In livid death, the bright rhythm stolen,
The gold grain flattened and unscythed, The boars in the vineyard gnarled and sullen
Havocking the grapes; and the pouncing wind Spins the spattered leaves of the glen
In a mockery-dance, death’s hue-and-cry;
With all my murmurous pipes flung by
And summer not to come again.

Is there a sadder line in all English poetry than that last line, with its plain prediction – not a fear or a premonition, but a certainty – of the final end of all our summers?

His experience of the Great War left Blunden with the nagging awareness of death lurking in ambush everywhere; an awareness that we, today, are beginning to possess, now that war is no longer restricted to a well-defined battlefield, “over there,” but threatens the most public places of our cities, as well as our planes, trains, and buses. In “The Midnight Skaters,” he imagines death lying in wait beneath the frozen pond where skaters “wheel and whip.” And this is not some bucolic phantom of death, but a death that “hates” us:

Then is not death at watch Within those secret waters?
What wants he but to catch Earth’s heedless sons and daughters?
With but a crystal parapet Between, he has his engines set.

The phrase “crystal parapet” seems at first a bit of literary fluff, but as Mr. Fussell has shown, Blunden uses the phrase to evoke the hazardous lip of the trenches, where even to poke up one’s head was to risk instantaneous destruction. Yet, what can we do but skate madly on that menacing surface to the promptings of the living blood in our veins?

Then on, blood shouts, on, on, Twirl, wheel and whip above him,
Dance on this ball-floor thin and wan, Use him as though you love him;
Court him, elude him, reel and pass, And let him hate you through the glass.

The gliding stanzas only look old-fashioned; in fact, they mimic our own pirouettes across the dizzy surface of the too-thin ice.

Most anthologies give one or two of Blunden’s poems; he deserves to be better known. The best selection I’ve found is “Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War”(Duckworth), edited by Martin Taylor. The title, of course, echoes Blunden’s classic prose memoir, “Undertones of War” (Penguin Classics).

Blunden’s awareness of death as a cunning sniper appears in another poem, which I quote in full; it shows to perfection how elegantly restrained diction can be turned to chilling purpose. This is “Water Moment,” which describes an eel hunting among beautifully patterned fish:

The silver eel slips through the waving weeds,
And in the tunnelled shining stone recedes,
The earnest eye surveys the crystal pond
And guards the cave: the sweet shoals pass beyond.
The watery jewels that these have for eyes,
The tiger streaks in him that hind most plies,
The red gold wings that smooth their darting paces,
The sunlight dancing about their airs and graces,
Burn that strange watcher’s heart; then the sly brain
Speaks, all the dumb shoals shriek, and by the stone
The silver death writhes with the chosen one.

Only someone who had witnessed how patiently death lurks in seemingly idyllic places could have captured the full ferocity of the eel’s attack. It is the beauty of the setting that conveys the horror.