Edmund Charles Blunden (1 November 1896 – 20 January 1974) was an English poet, author, and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.

Early years

Born in London, Blunden was the eldest of the nine children of Charles Edmund Blunden (1871–1951) and his wife, Georgina Margaret née Tyler, who were joint-headteachers of Yalding school. Blunden was educated at Christ's Hospital and The Queen's College, Oxford.

World War I

In September 1915, over a year after the outbreak of World War I, Blunden was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant into the British Army's Royal Sussex Regiment. He was posted to the 11th (Service) Battalion (1st South Down), Royal Sussex Regiment, a Kitchener's Army unit that formed part of the 116th Brigade of the 39th Division in May 1916, two months after the battalion's arrival in France. He served with the battalion on the Western Front to the end of the war, taking part in the actions at Ypres and the Somme, followed in 1917 by the Battle of Passchendaele. In January 1917, and by now a temporary lieutenant (having been promoted to that rank in September 1916), he was awarded the Military Cross (MC), the citation for which reads:

Blunden survived nearly two years in the front line without physical injury (despite being gassed in October 1917), but for the rest of his life, he bore mental scars from his experiences. His own account of his experiences was published in 1928, as Undertones of War.

University

Blunden left the army in 1919 and took up the scholarship at Oxford that he had won while he was still at school. In December 1925, he dedicated a poem « UP!UP! » to the rugby men of the University and this became the anthem of the Tokyo University RFC. He returned to England in 1927, and was literary editor of the Nation for a year. In 1927, he published a short book, On the Poems of Henry Vaughan, Characteristics and Intimations, with his principal Latin poems carefully translated into English verse (London: H. Cobden-Sanderson, 1927), expanding and revising an essay that he had published, in November 1926, in the London Mercury. In 1931, he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of Merton College, where he was highly regarded as a tutor. During his years in Oxford, Blunden published extensively: several collections of poetry including Choice or Chance (1934) and Shells by a Stream (1944), prose works on Charles Lamb; Edward Gibbon; Leigh Hunt; Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley: A Life Story); John Taylor; and Thomas Hardy; and a book about a game he loved, Cricket Country (1944). He returned to full-time writing in 1944, becoming assistant editor of The Times Literary Supplement. In 1947, he returned to Japan as a member of the British liaison mission in Tokyo. In 1953 after three years back in England, he accepted the post of Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong. When Blunden returned to England in 1927, Aki accompanied him and would become his secretary. The relationship later changed from a romantic one to a platonic friendship, and they remained in contact for the rest of her life. An affectionate obituary tribute in The Guardian commented, "He loved cricket… and played it ardently and very badly",</blockquote>

In a 2009 appreciation of the book and its author, Bangalore writer Suresh Menon wrote:

<blockquote>Any cricket book that talks easily of Henry James and Siegfried Sassoon and Ranji and Grace and Richard Burton (the writer, not the actor) and Coleridge is bound to have a special charm of its own. As Blunden says, "The game which made me write at all, is not terminated at the boundary, but is reflected beyond, is echoed and varied out there among the gardens and the barns, the dells and the thickets, and belongs to some wider field."</blockquote>

<blockquote>Perhaps that is what all books on cricket are trying to say.</blockquote>

Blunden had a robust sense of humour. In Hong Kong, he relished linguistic misunderstandings such as those of the restaurant that offered "fried prawn's balls" and the schoolboy who wrote, "In Hong Kong there is a queer at every bus-stop".

His fellow poets' regard for Blunden was illustrated by the contributions to a dinner in his honour for which poems were specially written by Cecil Day-Lewis and William Plomer; T. S. Eliot and Walter de la Mare were guests; and Sassoon provided the Burgundy.

Honours

Blunden's public honours included the CBE, 1951; the Queen's gold medal for Poetry, 1956; the Royal Society of Literature's Benson Medal; the Order of the Rising Sun, 3rd Class (Japan), 1963; and honorary Membership of the Japan Academy. The inscription on the stone was taken from Wilfred Owen's "Preface" to his poems and reads: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

Works

Blunden's output was prolific, and he is one of the writers most quoted in The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell's classic 1975 work on the literature of World War I.

To those who thought that he published too much, he quoted Walter de la Mare's observation that time was the poet's best editor.

Poetry

  • Poems 1913 and 1914 (1914);
  • Poems Translated from the French (1914);
  • Three Poems (1916);
  • The Barn (1916);
  • The Silver Bird of Herndyke Mill; Stane Street; The Gods of the World Beneath (1916);
  • The Harbingers (1916);
  • Pastorals (1916);
  • The Waggoner and Other Poems (1920);
  • The Shepherd, and Other Poems of Peace and War (1922);
  • Old Homes (1922);
  • To Nature: New Poems (1923);
  • Dead Letters (1923);
  • Masks of Time: A New Collection of Poems Principally Meditative (1925);
  • Japanese Garland (1928);
  • Retreat (1928);
  • Winter Nights: A Reminiscence (1928);
  • Near and Far: New Poems (1929);
  • A Summer's Fancy (1930);
  • To Themis: Poems on Famous Trials (1931);
  • In Summer (1931);
  • Constantia and Francis: An Autumn Evening (1931);
  • Halfway House: A Miscellany of New Poems (1932);
  • Choice or Chance: New Poems (1934);
  • Verses: To H.R.H. The Duke of Windsor (1936);
  • An Elegy and Other Poems (1937);
  • On Several Occasions (1938);
  • Poems, 1930–1940 (1940);
  • Shells by a Stream (1944);
  • After the Bombing, and Other Short Poems (1949);
  • Eastward: A Selection of Verses Original and Translated (1950);
  • Records of Friendship (1950);
  • Poems of Many Years (1957);
  • A Hong Kong House (1959);
  • Poems on Japan (1967).

Biographical books on romantic figures:

  • Leigh Hunt's 'Examiner' Examined (1928);
  • Leigh Hunt. A Biography (1930);
  • Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries (1933);
  • Edward Gibbon and his Age (1935);
  • Keats's Publisher. A Memoir (1936);
  • Thomas Hardy (1941);
  • Shelley. A Life Story (1946) with strong evidence on pp.&nbsp;278 and 290 that Shelley was murdered.

<gallery>

File:Edmund Blunden by William Rothenstein chalk, 1922.jpg|Edmund Blunden by William Rothenstein, chalk, 1922

File:Edmund Blunden by Rex Whistler pencil, 1929.jpg|Edmund Blunden by Rex Whistler, pencil, 1929

File:Edmund Blunden by Lady Ottoline Morrell vintage snapshot print, 1920 (cropped 2).jpg|Edmund Blunden by Lady Ottoline Morrell, vintage snapshot print, 1920

File:Edmund Blunden by Lady Ottoline Morrell vintage snapshot print, 1923 (cropped).jpg|Edmund Blunden by Lady Ottoline Morrell, vintage snapshot print, 1923

File:Bust of Edmund Blunden.jpg|Plaster bust of Edmund Blunden by KY Wong, early 1960s now at Merton College Library

File:Blunden portrait by Douglas Bland held in HKU archives.jpg|Blunden portrait by Douglas Bland held in HKU archives

</gallery>

References

Citations

Sources

  • Hart-Davis, Rupert (ed.), Lyttelton/Hart-Davis Letters Vol 5, John Murray, London 1983. .
  • Menon, Suresh. "The passionate poet." Cricinfo, 5 April 2009.
  • The Guardian obituary, 22 January 1974, p.&nbsp;12.
  • The Times obituary, 21 January 1974, p.&nbsp;14.
  • Ziegler, Philip, Rupert Hart-Davis: Man of Letters Chatto and Windus, London, 2004. .
  • John Greening (Ed.): Edmund Blunden's Undertones of war, Oxford : Oxford Univ. Press, 2015, .
  • Finding aid to Edmund Blunden papers at Columbia University. Rare Book & Manuscript Library.
  • https://www.1914-18.co.uk/blunden/
  • http://www.edmundblunden.org/
  • A large collection of Blunden's papers is located at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
  • The Blunden Collection hosted on Oxford University's server
  • Audiobook liner notes on readings by Blunden
  • Archival material at
  • Edmund Blunden reading and commenting on his poem "Concert Party" at Poetry Archive
  • The Papers of Edmund Blunden at Dartmouth College Library
  • Edmund Blunden Papers are housed at University of Iowa Libraries Special Collections & Archives.