| AdminHistory | Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) was a poet, author, critic and lecturer. He served as second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment during the First World War, seeing action in Flanders, Ypres and the battle of the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. Blunden took up a scholarship to Oxford in 1919, where he met Siegfried Sassoon, but left in 1920 to take up editorial work at The Anthenaeum. He published numerous collections of poetry, including 'The Shepherd' which won the Hawthornden prize in 1922. Blunden also published multiple biographies and a prose account of his wartime experiences, titled 'Undertones of War'. He worked as the assistant editor of the Times Literary Supplement, and lectured at universities in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Oxford, where he ended his career as Professor of Poetry. Blunden became a CBE in 1951, received the queen's gold medal for poetry in 1956, and was made a companion of the Royal Society of Literature in 1962. |