About Edmund Blunden
Edmund Charles Blunden was an English poet, author, and critic. Like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he wrote of his experiences in World War I in both verse and prose. For most of his career, Blunden was also a reviewer for English publications and an academic in Tokyo and later Hong Kong. He ended his career as Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature six times. Blunden left the army in 1919 and took up the scholarship at Oxford that he had won while he was still at school. Blunden's next book of poems, The Shepherd, published in 1922, won the Hawthornden Prize, but his poetry, though well reviewed, did not provide enough to live on. In January 1917, and by now a temporary lieutenant (having been promoted to that rank in September 1916), he was awarded the Military Cross (MC), the citation for which reads: For conspicuous gallantry in action.
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