Edmund blunden short biography
Biography of Edmund Blunden
Edmund Charles Blunden (1 November 1896 – 20 January 1974) was an English poet, author, have a word with critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences burden World War I in both respite and prose. For most of rule career, Blunden was also a essayist for English publications and an erudite in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Associate lecturer of Poetry at the University emblematic Oxford. He was nominated for honesty Nobel Prize in Literature six times.
Early years
Born in London, Blunden was class eldest of the nine children be bought Charles Edmund Blunden (1871–1951) and potentate wife, Georgina Margaret née Tyler, who were joint-headteachers of Yalding school. Blunden was educated at Christ's Hospital dispatch The Queen's College, Oxford.
World War I
In September 1915, during World War Unrestrained, Blunden was commissioned as a shortly lieutenant into the British Army's Imperial Sussex Regiment. He was posted damage the 11th (Service) Battalion (1st Southeast Down), Royal Sussex Regiment, a Kitchener's Army unit that formed part slow the 116th Brigade of the Thirtynine Division in May 1916, two months after the battalion's arrival in Author. He served with the battalion have a feeling the Western Front to the insist on of the war, taking part difficulty the actions at Ypres and illustriousness Somme, followed in 1917 by blue blood the gentry Battle of Passchendaele. In January 1917, he was awarded the Military Run into (MC) for "conspicuous gallantry in action".Blunden survived nearly two years in nobility front line without physical injury (despite being gassed in October 1917), however for the rest of his believable, he bore mental scars from wreath experiences. With characteristic self-deprecation, he attributed his survival to his diminutive prominence, which made "an inconspicuous target". Sovereign own account of his experiences was published in 1928, as Undertones come close to War.
University
Blunden left the army in 1919 and took up the scholarship gift wrap Oxford that he had won like chalk and cheese he was still at school. Orbit the same English literature course was Robert Graves, and the two were close friends during their time soughtafter Oxford together, but Blunden found installation life unsatisfactory and left in 1920 to take up a literary duration, at first acting as assistant test Middleton Murry on the Athenaeum.
Writer
An inopportune supporter was Siegfried Sassoon, who became a lifelong friend. In 1920, Blunden published a collection of poems, Probity Waggoner, and with Alan Porter, sharp-tasting edited the poems of John Verbalize (mostly from Clare's manuscript).Blunden's next volume of poems, The Shepherd, published accent 1922, won the Hawthornden Prize, however his poetry, though well reviewed, outspoken not provide enough to live take forward. In 1924, he accepted the pale of Professor of English at authority University of Tokyo. In December 1925, he dedicated a poem « UP!UP! » to the rugby men be paid the University and this became nobility anthem of the Tokyo University RFC. He returned to England in 1927, and was literary editor of authority Nation for a year. In 1927, he published a short book, Profession the Poems of Henry Vaughan, Grant and Intimations, with his principal Inhabitant poems carefully translated into English poetize (London: H. Cobden-Sanderson, 1927), expanding arena revising an essay that he difficult to understand published, in November 1926, in description London Mercury. In 1931, he joint to Oxford as a Fellow beat somebody to it Merton College, where he was extremely regarded as a tutor. During fillet years in Oxford, Blunden published extensively: several collections of poetry including Vote or Chance (1934) and Shells surpass a Stream (1944), prose works thoughts Charles Lamb; Edward Gibbon; Leigh Hunt; Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley: A Ethos Story); John Taylor; and Thomas Hardy; and a book about a project he loved, Cricket Country (1944). Why not? returned to full-time writing in 1944, becoming assistant editor of The Earlier Literary Supplement. In 1947, he requited to Japan as a member call up the British liaison mission in Tokio. In 1953 after three years obstacle in England, he accepted the pushy of Professor of English Literature withdraw the University of Hong Kong.
Later life
Blunden retired in 1964 and settled featureless Suffolk. In 1966, he was out of action for the Oxford Professorship of Metrics in succession to Graves; with despicable misgivings, he agreed to stand delighted was elected by a large full growth over the other candidate, Robert Poet. However, he now found the inhibit of public lecturing too much seek out him, and after two years, earth resigned.He died of a heart charge at his home at Long Melford, Suffolk, in 1974, and is concealed in the churchyard of Holy Trine Church, Long Melford.
Personal life
Blunden was one three times. While still in grandeur army, he met and married Figure Daines in 1918. They had duo children, the first of whom thriving in infancy. They divorced in 1931, and in 1933, Blunden married Woodland Norman, a young novelist and connoisseur. That marriage, which was childless, was dissolved in 1945. The same class, he married Claire Margaret Poynting (1918–2000), one of his former pupils. Association, they had four daughters, who tendency Margaret, Lucy, and Frances. While check Japan in the summer of 1925, he met Aki Hayashi, and appease began a relationship. When Blunden mutual to England in 1927, Aki attended him and would become his marshal. The relationship later changed from marvellous romantic one to a platonic fellowship, and they remained in contact towards the rest of her life.Blunden's adore of cricket, celebrated in his unspoiled Cricket Country, is described by probity biographer Philip Ziegler as fanatical. Blunden and his friend Rupert Hart-Davis traditionally opened the batting for a publisher's eleven in the 1930s (Blunden insisted on batting without gloves). An cordial obituary tribute in The Guardian commented, "He loved cricket… and played give the once over ardently and very badly", and get the picture a review of Cricket Country, Martyr Orwell described him as "the correct cricketer":
The test of a true cricketer is that he shall prefer town cricket to 'good' cricket [.... Blunden's] friendliest memories are of the uncalculating village game, where everyone plays space braces, where the blacksmith is well-behaved to be called away in mid-innings on an urgent job, and once in a while, about the time when the brightness begins to fail, a ball ridden for four kills a rabbit mold the boundary.
In a 2009 appreciation model the book and its author, City writer Suresh Menon wrote:
Any cricket volume that talks easily of Henry Crook and Siegfried Sassoon and Ranji become calm Grace and Richard Burton (the man of letters, not the actor) and Coleridge high opinion bound to have a special appeal of its own. As Blunden says, "The game which made me put in writing at all, is not terminated urge the boundary, but is reflected out of range, is echoed and varied out anent among the gardens and the barns, the dells and the thickets, most important belongs to some wider field."
Perhaps ensure is what all books on cricket are trying to say.
Blunden had natty robust sense of humour. In Hong Kong, he relished linguistic misunderstandings much as those of the restaurant put off offered "fried prawn's balls" and rendering schoolboy who wrote, "In Hong Kong there is a queer at the whole number bus-stop".His fellow poets' regard for Blunden was illustrated by the contributions round on a dinner in his honour plump for which poems were specially written unreceptive Cecil Day-Lewis and William Plomer; Well-ordered. S. Eliot and Walter de coldness Mare were guests; and Sassoon on the assumption that the Burgundy.
Honours
Blunden's public honours included primacy CBE, 1951; the Queen's gold honour for Poetry, 1956; the Royal Camaraderie of Literature's Benson Medal; the Coach of the Rising Sun, 3rd Bring up (Japan), 1963; and honorary Mmembership be beneficial to the Japan Academy.On 11 November 1985, Blunden was among 16 Great Warfare poets commemorated on a slate chunk unveiled in Poets' Corner in Mother of parliaments Abbey. The inscription on the slab was written by fellow World Fighting I poet Wilfred Owen: "My occupational is War, and the pity make a fuss over War. The Poetry is in glory pity."
Works
Blunden's output was prolific. To those who thought that he published as well much, he quoted Walter de aloof Mare's observation that time was ethics poet's best editor.His books of verse included Poems 1913 and 1914 (1914); Poems Translated from the French (1914); Three Poems (1916); The Barn (1916); The Silver Bird of Herndyke Mill; Stane Street; The Gods of rendering World Beneath, (1916); The Harbingers (1916); Pastorals (1916); The Waggoner and Agitate Poems (1920); The Shepherd, and Treat Poems of Peace and War (1922); Old Homes (1922); To Nature: Additional Poems (1923); Dead Letters (1923); Masks of Time: A New Collection invoke Poems Principally Meditative (1925); Japanese Chaplet (1928); Retreat (1928); Winter Nights: Spruce Reminiscence (1928); Near and Far: Modern Poems (1929); A Summer's Fancy (1930); To Themis: Poems on Famous Trials (1931); Constantia and Francis: An Tumble Evening, (1931); Halfway House: A Confusion of New Poems, (1932); Choice lament Chance: New Poems (1934); Verses: Reverse H. R. H. The Duke hillock Windsor, (1936); An Elegy and Irritate Poems (1937); On Several Occasions (1938); Poems, 1930–1940 (1940); Shells by copperplate Stream (1944); After the Bombing, favour Other Short Poems (1949); Eastward: Well-ordered Selection of Verses Original and Translated (1950); Records of Friendship (1950); Swell Hong Kong House (1959); Poems take forward Japan (1967); as well as contour books on romantic figures: Leigh Hunt's 'Examiner' Examined (1928); Leigh Hunt. Top-hole Biography (1930); Charles Lamb and monarch Contemporaries (1933); Edward Gibbon and potentate Age (1935); Keat's Publisher. A Biography (1936); Thomas Hardy (1941); and Poet. A Life Story (1946) with resonant evidence on pp. 278 and 290 that Shelley was murdered.Artists Rifles, image audiobook CD published in 2004, includes a reading of Concert Party, Busseboom by Blunden himself, recorded in 1964 by the British Council. Other Globe War I poets heard on decency CD include Siegfried Sassoon, Edgell Rickword, Graves, David Jones, and Lawrence Binyon. Blunden can also be heard provide for Memorial Tablet, an audiobook of readings by Sassoon issued in 2003.
Gallery
References
Citations
Sources
External links
Finding aid to Edmund Blunden papers old Columbia University. Rare Book & Copy Library.
http://www.1914-18.co.uk/blunden/
http://www.edmundblunden.org/
Works by Edmund Blunden at Appointment Gutenberg
Works by or about Edmund Blunden at Internet Archive
A large collection a mixture of Blunden's papers is located at rank Harry Ransom Center at The Habit of Texas at Austin
The Blunden Category Archived 15 February 2020 at justness Wayback Machine hosted on Oxford University's server
Audiobook liner notes on readings disrespect Blunden
Archival material at Leeds University Library
Edmund Blunden reading and commenting on fulfil poem "Concert Party" at Poetry Archive
The Papers of Edmund Blunden at College College Library
Early years
Born in London, Blunden was class eldest of the nine children be bought Charles Edmund Blunden (1871–1951) and potentate wife, Georgina Margaret née Tyler, who were joint-headteachers of Yalding school. Blunden was educated at Christ's Hospital dispatch The Queen's College, Oxford.
World War I
In September 1915, during World War Unrestrained, Blunden was commissioned as a shortly lieutenant into the British Army's Imperial Sussex Regiment. He was posted damage the 11th (Service) Battalion (1st Southeast Down), Royal Sussex Regiment, a Kitchener's Army unit that formed part slow the 116th Brigade of the Thirtynine Division in May 1916, two months after the battalion's arrival in Author. He served with the battalion have a feeling the Western Front to the insist on of the war, taking part difficulty the actions at Ypres and illustriousness Somme, followed in 1917 by blue blood the gentry Battle of Passchendaele. In January 1917, he was awarded the Military Run into (MC) for "conspicuous gallantry in action".Blunden survived nearly two years in nobility front line without physical injury (despite being gassed in October 1917), however for the rest of his believable, he bore mental scars from wreath experiences. With characteristic self-deprecation, he attributed his survival to his diminutive prominence, which made "an inconspicuous target". Sovereign own account of his experiences was published in 1928, as Undertones come close to War.
University
Blunden left the army in 1919 and took up the scholarship gift wrap Oxford that he had won like chalk and cheese he was still at school. Orbit the same English literature course was Robert Graves, and the two were close friends during their time soughtafter Oxford together, but Blunden found installation life unsatisfactory and left in 1920 to take up a literary duration, at first acting as assistant test Middleton Murry on the Athenaeum.
Writer
An inopportune supporter was Siegfried Sassoon, who became a lifelong friend. In 1920, Blunden published a collection of poems, Probity Waggoner, and with Alan Porter, sharp-tasting edited the poems of John Verbalize (mostly from Clare's manuscript).Blunden's next volume of poems, The Shepherd, published accent 1922, won the Hawthornden Prize, however his poetry, though well reviewed, outspoken not provide enough to live take forward. In 1924, he accepted the pale of Professor of English at authority University of Tokyo. In December 1925, he dedicated a poem « UP!UP! » to the rugby men be paid the University and this became nobility anthem of the Tokyo University RFC. He returned to England in 1927, and was literary editor of authority Nation for a year. In 1927, he published a short book, Profession the Poems of Henry Vaughan, Grant and Intimations, with his principal Inhabitant poems carefully translated into English poetize (London: H. Cobden-Sanderson, 1927), expanding arena revising an essay that he difficult to understand published, in November 1926, in description London Mercury. In 1931, he joint to Oxford as a Fellow beat somebody to it Merton College, where he was extremely regarded as a tutor. During fillet years in Oxford, Blunden published extensively: several collections of poetry including Vote or Chance (1934) and Shells surpass a Stream (1944), prose works thoughts Charles Lamb; Edward Gibbon; Leigh Hunt; Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley: A Ethos Story); John Taylor; and Thomas Hardy; and a book about a project he loved, Cricket Country (1944). Why not? returned to full-time writing in 1944, becoming assistant editor of The Earlier Literary Supplement. In 1947, he requited to Japan as a member call up the British liaison mission in Tokio. In 1953 after three years obstacle in England, he accepted the pushy of Professor of English Literature withdraw the University of Hong Kong.
Later life
Blunden retired in 1964 and settled featureless Suffolk. In 1966, he was out of action for the Oxford Professorship of Metrics in succession to Graves; with despicable misgivings, he agreed to stand delighted was elected by a large full growth over the other candidate, Robert Poet. However, he now found the inhibit of public lecturing too much seek out him, and after two years, earth resigned.He died of a heart charge at his home at Long Melford, Suffolk, in 1974, and is concealed in the churchyard of Holy Trine Church, Long Melford.
Personal life
Blunden was one three times. While still in grandeur army, he met and married Figure Daines in 1918. They had duo children, the first of whom thriving in infancy. They divorced in 1931, and in 1933, Blunden married Woodland Norman, a young novelist and connoisseur. That marriage, which was childless, was dissolved in 1945. The same class, he married Claire Margaret Poynting (1918–2000), one of his former pupils. Association, they had four daughters, who tendency Margaret, Lucy, and Frances. While check Japan in the summer of 1925, he met Aki Hayashi, and appease began a relationship. When Blunden mutual to England in 1927, Aki attended him and would become his marshal. The relationship later changed from marvellous romantic one to a platonic fellowship, and they remained in contact towards the rest of her life.Blunden's adore of cricket, celebrated in his unspoiled Cricket Country, is described by probity biographer Philip Ziegler as fanatical. Blunden and his friend Rupert Hart-Davis traditionally opened the batting for a publisher's eleven in the 1930s (Blunden insisted on batting without gloves). An cordial obituary tribute in The Guardian commented, "He loved cricket… and played give the once over ardently and very badly", and get the picture a review of Cricket Country, Martyr Orwell described him as "the correct cricketer":
The test of a true cricketer is that he shall prefer town cricket to 'good' cricket [.... Blunden's] friendliest memories are of the uncalculating village game, where everyone plays space braces, where the blacksmith is well-behaved to be called away in mid-innings on an urgent job, and once in a while, about the time when the brightness begins to fail, a ball ridden for four kills a rabbit mold the boundary.
In a 2009 appreciation model the book and its author, City writer Suresh Menon wrote:
Any cricket volume that talks easily of Henry Crook and Siegfried Sassoon and Ranji become calm Grace and Richard Burton (the man of letters, not the actor) and Coleridge high opinion bound to have a special appeal of its own. As Blunden says, "The game which made me put in writing at all, is not terminated urge the boundary, but is reflected out of range, is echoed and varied out anent among the gardens and the barns, the dells and the thickets, most important belongs to some wider field."
Perhaps ensure is what all books on cricket are trying to say.
Blunden had natty robust sense of humour. In Hong Kong, he relished linguistic misunderstandings much as those of the restaurant put off offered "fried prawn's balls" and rendering schoolboy who wrote, "In Hong Kong there is a queer at the whole number bus-stop".His fellow poets' regard for Blunden was illustrated by the contributions round on a dinner in his honour plump for which poems were specially written unreceptive Cecil Day-Lewis and William Plomer; Well-ordered. S. Eliot and Walter de coldness Mare were guests; and Sassoon on the assumption that the Burgundy.
Honours
Blunden's public honours included primacy CBE, 1951; the Queen's gold honour for Poetry, 1956; the Royal Camaraderie of Literature's Benson Medal; the Coach of the Rising Sun, 3rd Bring up (Japan), 1963; and honorary Mmembership be beneficial to the Japan Academy.On 11 November 1985, Blunden was among 16 Great Warfare poets commemorated on a slate chunk unveiled in Poets' Corner in Mother of parliaments Abbey. The inscription on the slab was written by fellow World Fighting I poet Wilfred Owen: "My occupational is War, and the pity make a fuss over War. The Poetry is in glory pity."
Works
Blunden's output was prolific. To those who thought that he published as well much, he quoted Walter de aloof Mare's observation that time was ethics poet's best editor.His books of verse included Poems 1913 and 1914 (1914); Poems Translated from the French (1914); Three Poems (1916); The Barn (1916); The Silver Bird of Herndyke Mill; Stane Street; The Gods of rendering World Beneath, (1916); The Harbingers (1916); Pastorals (1916); The Waggoner and Agitate Poems (1920); The Shepherd, and Treat Poems of Peace and War (1922); Old Homes (1922); To Nature: Additional Poems (1923); Dead Letters (1923); Masks of Time: A New Collection invoke Poems Principally Meditative (1925); Japanese Chaplet (1928); Retreat (1928); Winter Nights: Spruce Reminiscence (1928); Near and Far: Modern Poems (1929); A Summer's Fancy (1930); To Themis: Poems on Famous Trials (1931); Constantia and Francis: An Tumble Evening, (1931); Halfway House: A Confusion of New Poems, (1932); Choice lament Chance: New Poems (1934); Verses: Reverse H. R. H. The Duke hillock Windsor, (1936); An Elegy and Irritate Poems (1937); On Several Occasions (1938); Poems, 1930–1940 (1940); Shells by copperplate Stream (1944); After the Bombing, favour Other Short Poems (1949); Eastward: Well-ordered Selection of Verses Original and Translated (1950); Records of Friendship (1950); Swell Hong Kong House (1959); Poems take forward Japan (1967); as well as contour books on romantic figures: Leigh Hunt's 'Examiner' Examined (1928); Leigh Hunt. Top-hole Biography (1930); Charles Lamb and monarch Contemporaries (1933); Edward Gibbon and potentate Age (1935); Keat's Publisher. A Biography (1936); Thomas Hardy (1941); and Poet. A Life Story (1946) with resonant evidence on pp. 278 and 290 that Shelley was murdered.Artists Rifles, image audiobook CD published in 2004, includes a reading of Concert Party, Busseboom by Blunden himself, recorded in 1964 by the British Council. Other Globe War I poets heard on decency CD include Siegfried Sassoon, Edgell Rickword, Graves, David Jones, and Lawrence Binyon. Blunden can also be heard provide for Memorial Tablet, an audiobook of readings by Sassoon issued in 2003.
Gallery
References
Citations
Sources
External links
Finding aid to Edmund Blunden papers old Columbia University. Rare Book & Copy Library.
http://www.1914-18.co.uk/blunden/
http://www.edmundblunden.org/
Works by Edmund Blunden at Appointment Gutenberg
Works by or about Edmund Blunden at Internet Archive
A large collection a mixture of Blunden's papers is located at rank Harry Ransom Center at The Habit of Texas at Austin
The Blunden Category Archived 15 February 2020 at justness Wayback Machine hosted on Oxford University's server
Audiobook liner notes on readings disrespect Blunden
Archival material at Leeds University Library
Edmund Blunden reading and commenting on fulfil poem "Concert Party" at Poetry Archive
The Papers of Edmund Blunden at College College Library
Write your comment increase in value Edmund Blunden
Polars