Edmund Blunden Edmund Charles Blunden , MC ( 1 November 1896 – 20 January 1974 ) 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 . Biography . Early years and World War I . Born in London , Blunden was the eldest of the nine children of Charles Edmund Blunden ( 1871 – 1951 ) and his wife , Georgina Margaret " née " Tyler , who were joint - headteachers of a London school . Blunden was educated at Christ ' s Hospital and The Queen ' s College , Oxford . In August 1915 Blunden was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Sussex Regiment and served with them right up to the end of World War I , taking part in the actions at Ypres and the Somme , and receiving the Military Cross in the process . Unusual for a junior infantry officer , Blunden survived nearly two years in the front line without physical injury , but for the rest of his life bore mental scars from his experiences . With characteristic self - deprecation he attributed his survival to his diminutive size : he made " an inconspicuous target " . Although he wrote war poems , he avoided the graphic edge that characterises the work of Sassoon or Wilfred Owen , and his memoirs of war service , though beautifully written , lack the immediacy of those of Sassoon or Robert Graves . His own account of his frequently traumatic experiences was published in 1928 under the title " Undertones of War " . Career as a writer . Blunden left the army in 1919 and took up the scholarship at Oxford that he had won while still at school . On the same English Literature course was Robert Graves , and the two were close friends during their time at Oxford together , but Blunden found university life unsatisfactory and left in 1920 to take up a literary career , at first acting as assistant to Middleton Murry on the " Athenaeum " magazine . An early supporter was Siegfried Sassoon , who became a lifelong friend . In 1920 Blunden published a collection of poems , " The Waggoner " , and with Alan Porter edited the poems of John Clare ( mostly from Clare ' s manuscript ) . 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 , and in 1924 he accepted the post of Professor of English at the University of Tokyo . He returned to England in 1927 , and was literary editor of " Nation " magazine for a year . In 1927 he published a short book , " On the Poems of Henry Vaughan , Characteristics and Intimations , with his principal Latin poems carefully translated into English verse " ( London : H . Cobden - Sanderson , 1927 ) , expanding and revising an essay that he had published in November 1926 in the " London Mercury " . In 1931 he returned to Oxford as a Fellow of Merton College , where he was highly regarded as a tutor . During his years in Oxford , Blunden published extensively : several collections of poetry including " Choice or Chance " ( 1934 ) and " Shells by a Stream " ( 1944 ) , prose works on Charles Lamb ; Edward Gibbon ; Keats ' s publisher ; Percy Bysshe Shelley ( " " ) ; John Taylor ; and Thomas Hardy ; and a book about a game he loved , " Cricket Country " ( 1944 ) . He returned to full - time writing in 1944 , becoming assistant editor of " The Times Literary Supplement " . In 1947 he returned to Japan as a member of the British liaison mission in Tokyo . In 1953 , after three years back in England he accepted the post of Professor of English Literature at the University of Hong Kong . Blunden retired in 1964 and settled in Suffolk . In 1966 he was nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry in succession to Robert Graves ; with some misgivings he agreed to stand and was elected by a large majority over the other candidate , Robert Lowell . However , he now found the strain of public lecturing too much for him , and after two years he resigned . He died of a heart attack at his home at Long Melford , Suffolk , on 20 January 1974 , and is buried in the churchyard of Holy Trinity Church , Long Melford . Personal life . Blunden was married three times . While still in the army he met and married Mary Daines in 1918 . They had three children , the first of whom died in infancy . They divorced in 1931 , and in 1933 Blunden married Sylva Norman , a young novelist and critic . That marriage , which was childless , was dissolved in 1945 , and in the same year he married Claire Margaret Poynting , a former pupil of his ; they had four daughters . While in Japan in the summer of 1925 , he met Aki Hayashi , with whom he began a relationship . When Blunden returned to England in 1927 , Aki accompanied him and would become his secretary . The relation later changed from a partner to a friend , but they remained in contact for the rest of her life . Blunden ' s love of cricket , celebrated in his book " Cricket Country " , is described by the biographer Philip Ziegler as fanatical . Blunden and his friend Rupert Hart - Davis regularly opened the batting for a publisher ' s eleven in the 1930s ( Blunden insisted on batting without gloves ) . An affectionate obituary tribute in " The Guardian " commented , " He loved cricket . . . and played it ardently and very badly " , while in a review of " Cricket Country " , George Orwell described him as " the true cricketer " : The test of a true cricketer is that he shall prefer village cricket to ' good ' cricket [ . . . Blunden ' s ] friendliest memories are of the informal village game , where everyone plays in braces , where the blacksmith is liable to be called away in mid - innings on an urgent job , and sometimes , about the time when the light begins to fail , a ball driven for four kills a rabbit on the boundary . In a 2009 appreciation of the book and its author , Bangalore writer Suresh Menon writes , Any cricket book that talks easily of Henry James and Siegfried Sassoon and Ranji and Grace and Richard Burton ( the writer , not the actor ) and Coleridge is bound to have a special charm of its own . As Blunden says , " The game which made me write at all , is not terminated at the boundary , but is reflected beyond , is echoed and varied out there among the gardens and the barns , the dells and the thickets , and belongs to some wider field . " Perhaps that is what all books on cricket are trying to say . Blunden had a robust sense of humour . In Hong Kong he relished linguistic misunderstandings such as those of the restaurant that offered " fried prawn ' s balls " and the schoolboy who wrote , " In Hong Kong there is a queer at every bus - stop . " His fellow poets ' regard for Blunden was illustrated by the contributions to a dinner in his honour for which poems were specially written by Cecil Day - Lewis and William Plomer ; T . S . Eliot and Walter de la Mare were guests ; and Siegfried Sassoon provided the Burgundy . Honours . Blunden ' s public honours included the C . B . E . , 1951 ; the Queen ' s Gold Medal for Poetry , 1956 ; The Royal Society of Literature ' s Benson Medal ; the Order of the Rising Sun , 3rd Class ( Japan ) , 1963 ; and Honorary Membership of the Japan Academy . On 11 November 1985 , Blunden was among 16 Great War poets commemorated on a slate stone unveiled in Poet ' s Corner in Westminster Abbey The inscription on the stone was written by fellow Great War poet , Wilfred Owen . It reads : " My subject is War , and the pity of War . The Poetry is in the pity . " Works . Blunden ' s output was prolific . To those who thought he published too much he quoted Walter de la Mare ' s observation that time was the poet ' s best editor . His books of poetry include " 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 the World Beneath , " ( 1916 ) ; " The Harbingers " ( 1916 ) ; " Pastorals " ( 1916 ) ; " The Waggoner and Other Poems " ( 1920 ) ; " The Shepherd , and Other Poems of Peace and War " ( 1922 ) ; " Old Homes " ( 1922 ) ; " To Nature : New Poems " ( 1923 ) ; " Dead Letters " ( 1923 ) ; " Masks of Time : A New Collection of Poems Principally Meditative " ( 1925 ) ; " Japanese Garland " ( 1928 ) ; " Retreat " ( 1928 ) ; " Winter Nights : A Reminiscence " ( 1928 ) ; " Near and Far : New Poems " ( 1929 ) ; " A Summer ' s Fancy " ( 1930 ) ; " To Themis : Poems on Famous Trials " ( 1931 ) ; " Constantia and Francis : An Autumn Evening , " ( 1931 ) ; " Halfway House : A Miscellany of New Poems , " ( 1932 ) ; " Choice or Chance : New Poems " ( 1934 ) ; " Verses : To H . R . H . The Duke of Windsor , " ( 1936 ) ; " An Elegy and Other Poems " ( 1937 ) ; " On Several Occasions " ( 1938 ) ; " Poems , 1930 – 1940 " ( 1940 ) ; " Shells by a Stream " ( 1944 ) ; " After the Bombing , and Other Short Poems " ( 1949 ) ; " Eastward : A Selection of Verses Original and Translated " ( 1950 ) ; " Records of Friendship " ( 1950 ) ; " A Hong Kong House " ( 1959 ) ; " Poems on Japan " ( 1967 ) . " Artists Rifles " , an audiobook CD published in 2004 , includes a reading of " Concert Party , Busseboom " by Blunden himself , recorded in 1964 by the British Council . Other Great War poets heard on the CD include Siegfried Sassoon , Edgell Rickword , Robert Graves , David Jones and Lawrence Binyon . Blunden can also be heard on " Memorial Tablet " , an audiobook of readings by Sassoon issued in 2003 .