Edmund Blunden

Born in London in 1896, Edmund Blunden served in the First World War and was awarded the Military Cross. That experience shaped much of his writing, including the celebrated memoir Undertones of War, as well as poems that reflect both the damage of war and his lasting attention to the natural world.

After the war, he built a wide-ranging literary life as a poet, critic, editor, biographer, and teacher. He was also an important scholar of earlier English literature and helped edit the poems of Wilfred Owen, linking his own generation of war writing with the poets who came before and beside him.

Blunden taught and lectured in England and abroad, including in Japan and Hong Kong, and in 1966 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He died in 1974, leaving behind a body of work admired for its grace, restraint, and emotional honesty.