18 Facts About Edmund Blunden

For most of his career, Blunden was a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong.

Edmund Blunden ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford.

Edmund Blunden was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times.

Edmund Blunden was educated at Christ's Hospital and The Queen's College, Oxford.

In September 1915, over a year after the outbreak of World War I, Edmund Blunden was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant into the British Army's Royal Sussex Regiment.

Edmund Blunden was posted to the 11th Battalion, Royal Sussex Regiment, a Kitchener's Army unit that formed part of the 116th Brigade of the 39th Division in May 1916, two months after the battalion's arrival in France.

Edmund Blunden served with the battalion on the Western Front to the end of the war, taking part in the actions at Ypres and the Somme, followed in 1917 by the Battle of Passchendaele.

Edmund Blunden displayed great courage and determination when in charge of a carrying party under heavy fire.

Edmund 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.

Edmund Blunden left the army in 1919 and took up the scholarship at Oxford that he had won while he was still at school.

In 1920, Edmund Blunden published a collection of poems, The Waggoner, and with Alan Porter, he edited the poems of John Clare.

Edmund Blunden returned to England in 1927, and was literary editor of the Nation for a year.

Edmund Blunden returned to full-time writing in 1944, becoming assistant editor of The Times Literary Supplement.

Edmund Blunden died of a heart attack at his home at Long Melford, Suffolk, in 1974, and is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church, Long Melford.

When Edmund Blunden returned to England in 1927, Aki accompanied him and would become his secretary.

On 11 November 1985, Edmund Blunden was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey.

Artists Rifles, an audiobook CD published in 2004, includes a reading of Concert Party, Busseboom by Edmund Blunden himself, recorded in 1964 by the British Council.

Edmund Blunden can be heard on Memorial Tablet, an audiobook of readings by Sassoon issued in 2003.