Educated at Christ's Hospital and Queen's College, Oxford where he read classics, Blunden left school in order to volunteer for the army in 1915. In early 1916 he joined the 11th Royal Sussex Regiment and saw action throughout the Western Front, winning the Military Cross for bravery under fire. When he was finally de-mobbed in 1919, he was the longest serving of the 'War Poets'. He began writing poetry at school and continued during the war and when he returned to Oxford in 1919, he began to study English literature. It was at this time that he struck up a lasting friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, who was the literary editor of the Daily Herald and who encouraged Blunden in his writing. Because of financial difficulties, Blunden again left Oxford to become a writer for the Athenaeum. In 1920, he published The Waggoner and Other Poems which won rave reviews and firmly established his literary reputation. Later that year, he published Poems Chiefly From Manuscript, being a collection of hitherto unpublished poems by John Clare. Suffering stress from the effects of the war, he traveled to South America for his health. Returning to England in 1922, he won the Hawthornden Prize for The Shepherd, a collection of poems on war and peace. He took a professorial position at Tokyo University in 1924 and spent three years there. He returned to England in 1927 and finished his autobiographical prose work Undertones of War, which was published in 1928. In 1930, he became the literary editor of The Nation and later that year began teaching at Merton College, Oxford. Blunden was instrumental in getting the poems of Wilfrid Owen published in 1931. In 1940, he returned to the army as a teacher at Oxford's Officer Training Corps. After the war he worked for a time as an assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement before taking a position as cultural advisor to the UK liaison mission to Japan. Ever popular in Japan, he was elected to the Japan Academy in 1950 and he remains to this day one of the most popular Western poets in Japan. In 1953, he took the chair of English at Hong Kong University until his retirement in 1964. After the death of his friend Sassoon in 1967, Blunden's own health began to deteriorate and he ceased to publish. He is one of the sixteen 'War Poets' commemorated at Westminster Abbey. His other works include The Bonadventure (1922), Marks of Time (1925), Retreat (1928), Near and far (1929), Leigh Hunt (1930), The Face of England (1932), English Villages (1941), Cricket Country (1944), After the Bombing (1949), Charles Lamb (1954) and A Hong Kong House (1962). |
