edmund blunden·1896 - 1974

historical figures selection box

use the down arrow to view option ========================= link to further material not in books ========================= ---------- section b ---------- bacon, john [BWM] baily, edward hodges [BWM] baker, sir herbert [Rem] behnes, william [BWM] bell, john [BWM] belsky, franta [BWM] binyon, laurence [Rem] blomfield, sir reginald [Rem] blunden, edmund [Rem] boehm, sir edgar [BWM] brock, sir thomas [BWM] butler, james [BWM] burdett-coutts, william [Rem] burnet, sir john james [Rem] ========================= ---------- section c ---------- chantrey, sir francis [BWM] churchill, sir winston [Rem] cockerell, professor charles [BWM] comper, sir ninian [BWM] ========================= ---------- section d ---------- derwent wood, professor francis [Rem] dick, sir william reid [BWM] drury, alfred [BWM] ========================= ---------- section e ---------- epstein, sir jacob [BWM] ========================= ---------- section f ---------- flaxman, professor john [BWM] frampton, sir george [BWM] ========================= ---------- section g ---------- gill, eric [BWM] gleichen, count victor [BWM] goscombe john, sir william [BWM] gotto, captain basil [BWM] ========================= ---------- section h ---------- haig, field marshall earl douglas [Rem] hepworth, philip [Rem] holden, charles [Rem] hutton, john [Rem] ========================= ---------- section j ---------- jackson, philip [BWM] jagger, charles sargeant [Rem] jones, captain adrian [BWM] ========================= ---------- section k ---------- kennington, eric [BWM] kenyon, colonel sir frederic [Rem] kipling, joseph rudyard [Rem] ========================= ---------- section l ---------- lafontaine, colonel cart de [Rem] lantéri, professor édouard [BWM] ledward, professor gilbert [BWM] lewis, sir robert [Rem] lloyd george, earl dwyfor - om [Rem] lorimer, sir robert [Rem] lutyens, sir edwin - om [Rem] ========================= ---------- section m ---------- mackenall, sir bertram [BWM] mallock, vivien [BWM] marochetti, baron carlo [BWM] marsh, sir edward howard [Rem] maufe, sir edward [Rem] mcmillan, william [BWM] melchett, lord [Rem] millington, major tasman [Rem] mills, john w [BWM] mond, sir alfred [Rem] ========================= ---------- section n ---------- nash, john [BWM] nightingale, florence - om [Rem] ========================= ---------- section 0 ---------- orpen, sir william [Rem] owen, wilfred [Rem] ========================= ---------- section p ---------- pegram, henry alfred [BWM] poole, henry [Rem] ========================= ---------- section r ---------- reid dick, sir william [BWM] roberts-jones, ivor [BWM] rosenburg, isaac [Rem] ========================= ---------- section s ---------- sassoon, siegfried [Rem] shepheard, sir peter [Rem] singer sargent, john [Rem] soissons, louis de [Rem] spencer, sir stanley [BWM] ========================= ---------- section t ---------- thornycroft, sir (william) hamo [BWM] toft, albert [BWM] turner, alfred [BWM] tweed, john [BWM] ========================= ---------- section w ---------- wade, george [BWM] ware, major general sir fabian [Rem] webb, sir aston [BWM] westmacott, sir richard [BWM] wheeler, sir charles [BWM] winter, faith [BWM] wood, francis derwent [BWM] worthington, sir hubert [Rem]

Edmund Charles Blunden was born in London in 1896, his family moved to Yalding, Kent shortly afterwards. He grew up in Kent and was educated at Christ's Hospital and Queen's College, Oxford. He was commissioned into the Royal Sussex Regiment in 1915 and served on the Western Front, where he earned the Military Cross for bravery at the age of 22.

“Blunden's reputation as a war poet has undeniably been overshadowed by Rosenberg, Sassoon and Owen and whilst his own poems are far more restrained, his hatred of the war and his grief for its dead were every bit as intense as theirs”

He fought on the Somme and at Passchendaele. As with the other major war poets, his wartime experiences had a profound effect and this was powerfully reflected in his poetry. In 1920 his collection of poetry The Waggoner was published after he had sent a privately printed collection of his verse to Siegfried Sassoon, literary editor of The Daily Herald, who immediately recognised his abilities and wrote him an encouraging letter initiating a lifelong friendship between the two cricket-playing poets.

Blunden's reputation as a war poet has undeniably been overshadowed by Rosenberg, Sassoon and Owen and whilst his own poems are far more restrained, his hatred of the war and his grief for its dead were every bit as intense as theirs. ‘For the next fifty years, as teacher, poet, journalist, writer, cultural diplomat and Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Blunden enjoyed a career of quiet distinction, but beneath the outward tranquillity of his success the horrors of the Western Front were never to leave him. To the end of his life he was haunted, waking and sleeping, by its memories, and yet if his experiences made him in later years a pacifist, no poet has ever written more eloquently of the courage and companionship of war or of the ways in which it showed ‘the common things as infinitely intimate and precious.'

The English author Thomas Hardy upon meeting Blunden formed the conclusion that he was the living embodiment of John Keats. In 1923 Blunden wrote an uncharacteristically savage review of Kipling's The Irish Guards in the Great War. Blunden was successively a literary critic, Professor of English Literature at Tokyo University (1924-27) and a Fellow and Tutor of English at Merton College, Oxford (1931-43).

In 1936 he hesitantly accepted Sir Fabian Ware's invitation to succeed Kipling as literary adviser to the Imperial War Graves Commission and the duties of this post engaged his energies until the work of commemorating the war dead of the Second World War was completed in the early 1960s. In 1937 he wrote the introduction to Ware's book The Immortal Heritage. After leaving Merton College, Blunden worked as literary critic for the Times Literary Supplement before he joined the UK Liaison Mission in Tokyo in 1948. He was revered as a scholar by the Japanese.

Returning to England in 1950 he recommenced work with the TLS. He served as Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Hong Kong University (1953-64). Blunden again performed the role as he had earlier for Wilfred Owen and brought the work of the composer poet Ivor Gurney to the attention of the British public in the volume of his poems he published in 1954. He was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry in 1956. Much of Blunden's work was devoted to editing, biography and criticism. His most important studies were of writers of the Romantic period, reserving a particular affection for Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, Charles Lamb and Leigh Hunt. He published a considerable body of work, amongst which was: Pastorals (1916), The Shepherd (1922) (which won him the Hawthornden Prize), English Poems (1925), Undertones of War (1928), The Poems of Edmund Blunden 1914-1930 (1930), Poems 1930-1940 (1940), Shells by a Stream (1944), After Bombing (1949), A Hong Kong House: Poems 1951-1962 (1962) and Eleven Poems (1965).

Blunden was elected Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1967, but retired from the post a year later due to ill-health. In retirement he became heavily involved with Christ's Hospital and his later years were spent with his wife Claire in the village of Long Melford, Suffolk where he died in January 1974.

It is perhaps best to leave the last word on Blunden to Sassoon, for whom he was both an inspiration and an important touchstone. In 1922 he wrote: ‘.... to have known Blunden is to have known a divine poet. Whether he is a great and sublime poet or whether he is of secondary importance as a writer, he is indeed a living emblem of all that is finest in this hazardous world of dust and dreams.'