Poet and critic, born in Yalding, Kent, SE England, UK. He studied at Oxford, was professor of English literature at Tokyo (19247), and fellow of Merton College, Oxford (from 1931). He joined the staff of The Times Literary Supplement (1943), and from 1953 lectured at the University of Hong Kong. He later became professor of poetry at Oxford (19668). A lover of the English countryside, he is essentially a nature poet, as is evident in Pastorals (1916) and The Waggoner and Other Poems (1920), but his prose work Undertones of War (1928) is widely considered his best.
Edmund Charles Blunden, MC (November 1, 1896 - January 20, 1974), although not one of the top trio of English World War I writers, was an important and influential poet, author and critic. In 1915, he was commissioned as an officer into the Royal Sussex Regiment, and served with them right up to the end of the war, taking part in the actions at Ypres and the Somme, and winning the Military Cross in the process.
It was after the war that Blunden began his long-standing friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, who came from the same part of England and whose interests in country pursuits he shared. Although he wrote war poems, he avoided the graphic edge that characterises the work of Sassoon or Wilfred Owen, and his memoirs of war service, though beautifully written, have been argued to have lacked the immediacy of those of Sassoon or Robert Graves.
In 1924 Blunden was invited to teach in Tokyo, and the years 1924-27 were one of two periods he spent working in Japan and the Far East.
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