Edmund Blunden
born Nov. 1, 1896, London
died Jan. 20, 1974, Long Melford, Suffolk,
Eng.
poet, critic, scholar, and man of
letters, whose verses in the traditional
mode are known for their rich and
knowledgeable expression of rural English
life.
Long a teacher in the Far East, he showed
in his later poetry Oriental influences, as
in A Hong Kong House (1962). His Undertones
of War (1928; new ed. 1956), which
established his international reputation, is
one of the most moving books about World War
I, all the more compelling for its
restraint. The war interrupted his studies
at Oxford, but he returned in 1919, moving
the following year to London as associate
editor of The Athenaeum. His poems began
appearing in the 1920s.
Blunden taught in Japan throughout most
of the 1920s and returned there in the late
1940s, after teaching at Oxford and serving
on the staff of The Times Literary
Supplement. He was professor of English at
Hong Kong University (1953–64) and professor
of poetry at Oxford (1966–68). His poetry is
collected in The Poems of Edmund Blunden,
1914–1930 (1930) and Poems 1930–1940 (1940).
Poems of Many Years appeared in 1957. One of
the major results of his scholarship was the
discovery and publication of unprinted poems
by the 19th-century peasant-poet John Clare.
