Blunden, Edmund (Charles) (1896–1974)

English poet and critic. He served in World War I and published the prose work Undertones of War (1928). His poetry is mainly about rural life. Among his scholarly contributions was the discovery and publication of some poems by the 19th-century poet John Clare.

Blunden was born in Yalding, Kent, and studied at Oxford University. He was professor of English literature at Tokyo University from 1924–27. In 1931 he became fellow and tutor in English literature at Merton College, Oxford, where he remained until 1943, when he joined the staff of the Times Literary Supplement. From 1953 he was head of the English department at the University of Hong Kong. He was professor of poetry at Oxford 1966–68.

His poems were published as early as 1914, but his first notable volume was The Waggoner and other Poems (1920), followed by The Shepherd and other Poems of Peace and War (1922). Several volumes of poems were issued in a collected edition in 1930, and subsequent volumes were collected in a second series published in 1940. Among his other works are biographies of the writers Leigh Hunt and Shelley, and works on Henry Vaughan, John Keats, and Charles Lamb.