Longest serving War Poet

They shaped our attitude to the Great War, if not all war, and produced some of the most important and influential work of the 20th century.

Next week, Oxford will celebrate the War Poets with leading scholars and writers speaking about Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and the others whose work continues to have enormous cultural resonance, as witnessed by the national debate surrounding the commemoration of the 1914-18 war, a century on.

But it will be the arrival of a 68-year-old retired teacher from Norfolk that will be most eagerly anticipated at the World War One Poetry Spring School, being run by Oxford University’s English Faculty from April 3 to 5 and open to the general public.

For her father, Edmund Blunden, was the longest serving of the First World War poets, having seen continuous action on the front line between 1916 and 1918. And in the judgment of Sassoon, his friend, he was the poet of the war most lastingly obsessed by it.

While others seek to reassess the poetic output, Margi Blunden will offer a personal insight into how her father, as one of the poets to survive the trenches, coped for years after with the trauma and horrors he witnessed on the Western Front.

As a survivor of the war Blunden had to learn to somehow live with his memories and deal with the ghosts of war, something he never really achieved.

For the war was to remain the backdrop to Edmund Blunden’s prolific writing, which has left a lasting testimony to the after-effects of war on the human mind.

Blunden was to live until 1974, passing away at his home aged 77. To the outside world, he had lived a long and hugely successful life. He served as a visiting professor in Japan and Hong Kong, and was for many years an English don at Merton College, Oxford, where in 1966 he was elected as the Oxford Professor of Poetry, as successor to his friend Robert Graves.

His post-election celebration, held at the Victoria Arms in Marston, was attended by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.

A passionate cricketer, his poetry was admired by adherents such as T.S. Eliot and he was to influence such great young writers as Keith Douglas, the finest poet of the Second World War.

But he paid a terrible price for being at the centre of some of the bloodiest fighting in the war, including the Battle of the Somme and the Third Battle of Ypres, suffering terrible nightmares for the rest of his life.

Miss Blunden said: “My father is different from the other War Poets. The war got into him and would not let go of him. It ate into his fabric.”

As a survivor of the war Blunden had to find a way to live with his memories.

Part of him continued to live in that time and he was unable to escape fully to the present. But that feeling was to inspire an impressive body of poetry, revealing the devastating personal impact of the war.

“He continued writing about the things that had happened to him afterwards — and in doing so he showed us what it was like to survive the war. “Psychologically he was strong and he was able to turn his memories into something creative by writing.”

Born in London in 1896, the eldest of nine children, Blunden won a scholarship to Christ’s Hospital, in Sussex. In October 1914, two months after the outbreak of war his first two volumes of poetry were published and there was further cause for celebration when he gained a place at The Queen’s College, Oxford to read classics.

But instead of heading to Oxford, he volunteered and in August 1915 was commissioned as a second lieutenant with the 11th Royal Sussex regiment.

“At the school, every Sunday, the head would read out the names of all the old boys who had died,” Miss Blunden said. “ It was enough to make him feel that he should do his bit. He certainly did not want to be given a white feather.”

Her father was awarded the Military Cross for “his conspicuous gallantry” in action during the Battle of the Somme.

He served in the Ypres salient and was there for the beginning of the Passchendaele offensive.

Gassed in 1917, he was posted to Suffolk, where he met and married Mary Daines.

But a shock awaited when, after the war, he turned his attentions again to Oxford.

Having fought for his country, he found that his scholarship had been withdrawn on the grounds that he had married.

Persistence finally paid off, with his war record finally given recognition, and the decision was reversed and he arrived in Oxford, deciding to read English.

Miss Blunden said: “I think that apart from David Jones, the other War Poets had much shorter periods on the front than my father. A lot of the poetry he wrote during the war was lost in the mud while he was moving around.”

Like other ex-servicemen at the university, Blunden found it hard to settle and he left to work for the journal The Athenaeum. With the publication in 1920 of The Waggoner, a collection of his poems, with The Shepherd and Other Poems of Peace and War appearing two years later, he won recognition as a writer of promise.

Blunden, a father-of-seven, continued to draw on his war experiences in his writing, contemplating events in retrospect, and his autobiographical Undertones of War was hailed as a major contribution to the literature of war.

He was also to play a pivotal role in bringing the work of other War Poets to the public for the first time, including Ivor Gurney and Wilfred Owen.

His 1931 edition of Owen’s poetry remained for many years the standard work and played an important part in establishing Owen’s reputation.

Her father was 50 years old when Miss Blunden was born to his third wife, Claire.

“By the time I was born, my father was well known as a poet, teacher and journalist. He was not like a normal dad, he was always busy, but my sisters and I had the advantage of a father who was rather special and charismatic. We grew up with the war. He talked about it. The war was part of his and our history.”

She has no doubt that for much of his life he suffered from post-traumatic stress.

“The dreams never stopped and he continued to feel guilt about having survived. But he had no treatment for it at all.”

Whereas when he was younger he could channel his feelings into his poetry and work, his daughter believes the stress became increasingly hard to manage as he grew older.

In addition to a career in teaching, Miss Blunden trained as a counsellor.

“I think that is linked to my father and wanting to understanding the effects of the war on him, as well as myself.”

She recalls one writer saying of him, “The war had won and the war goes on winning”: words that could be applied to other poets to be studied at the spring school.

The spring school follows a successful event held last April on the work of J.R.R. Tolkien.

Thanks to Miss Blunden, those attending will learn something of the price that the poets who survived had to pay, and kept on paying.

The spring school will be held at the Faculty of English, St Cross Building, University of Oxford, on April 3 to 5. To register visit english.ox.ac.uk
It costs £180 or £150 for concessions.