Edmund Blunden

Edmund Blunden
Born	(1896-11-01)1 November 1896 London, England
Died	20 January 1974(1974-01-20) (aged 77) Long Melford, Suffolk, England
Resting place	Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford
Occupation	Poet, author
Nationality	British
Education	Christ's Hospital; The Queen's College, Oxford
Notable works	Poems 1913 and 1914; An Elegy and Other Poems; Cricket Country; Poems on Japan
Notable awards	Military Cross; C.B.E.; the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry
Spouse	Mary Daines Sylva Norman Claire Margaret Poynting
Partner	Aki Hayashi
Children	seven

Edmund Charles Blunden, CBE, MC (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.

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.

In August 1915, during World War I (1914–1918), Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the British Army's Royal Sussex Regiment and served with the 11th (Southdowns) Battalion on the Western Front right up to the end of the war, taking part in the actions at Ypres and the Somme and receiving the Military Cross in the process. Unusually for a junior infantry officer, Blunden survived nearly two years in the front line without physical injury, but for the rest of his life, he bore mental scars from his experiences. With characteristic self-deprecation he attributed his survival to his diminutive size, which made "an inconspicuous target". His own account of his frequently traumatic experiences was published in 1928, as Undertones of War.

...
Wikipedia