Edmund Blunden

Edmund Charles Blunden was born in London, England, on November 1, 1896. He began studying at the University of Oxford, but he delayed his studies and enlisted
enlisted in 1914 and served on the front lines of World War I from 1916 to 1918. He returned to Oxford in 1919, and soon after, he moved to London to become the associate editor of The Athenaeum.

Blunden published several collections of poetry, including Poems of Many Years (Collins, 1957), Retreat (Doubleday, Doran, 1928), and The Shepherd and Other Poems of War and Peace (Alfred A. Knopf, 1922). Siegfried Sassoon is said to have called Blunden “the poet of the war most lastingly obsessed by it.” He was also the author of several works of biography and criticism.

Blunden spent many years teaching in Japan and Hong Kong as well as at Oxford. He died on January 20, 1974, in Suffolk, England.