Edmund Blunden

Author, critic, and poet (the latter which for which he is most well known) Edmund Blunden was born in London, and educated at The Queen's College at Oxford. In 1915 he was commissioned as a Second Lieutenant with the Royal Sussex Regiment which he served with through the end of the war. He saw heavy action on the Western Front at both Ypres and the Somme, and was awarded the Military Cross. Miraculously he was never severely injured. Following the war he served as Professor of English at the University of Tokyo from 1924-1927. He returned to England as magazine editor, and in 1931 he became a tutor at Oxford University where his writing career flourished. Post Second World War he became Professor of English Literature in Hong Kong. He succeeded fellow Great War poet Robert Graves as Oxford Professor of Poetry, but lecturing proved to be a strain and he resigned after two years. His remaining years were spent in Suffolk, where he died in 1974. He remained good friends with fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, and during his career edited some of the first editions of Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney's poetry contributing to their memory. He is commemorated on a plaque in Westminster Abbey along with 15 other poets of the First World War.