Edmund Blunden

Edmund Charles Blunden (born November 1, 1896 in London , † January 20, 1974 in Long Melford , Suffolk County ( England )) was an English poet , writer , literary scholar and critic . As a World War I poet , he is contemporary of his better-known compatriots Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon . His scientific and editorial work on John Clare and Ivor Gurney made them known to a wider readership. He was a professor in Oxford and Tokyo , which is why he is highly regarded as a European scholar in Japan .

Life

Youth and World War I

Blunden was born as the eldest of nine children to a teacher couple. In 1900 his family moved to the worker Location Yalding (county Kent ). This environment later inspired many of Blunden's poems. In 1909, he moved from the local grammar school to Christ's Hospital boarding school in Sussex , receiving a scholarship for his performance in the ancient languages . He passed the entrance examination to Queen's College at Oxford University , where he studied classical philology . Blunden turned down the opportunity for a doctorate and volunteered in the British Army in 1915 . In the spring of 1916 he became an officer in the 11th Royal Sussex Regiment. He took part in the battles near Ypres and the Somme , for which he was awarded the Military Cross . He described his view of war, especially traumatic experiences, in Undertones of War in 1928 .

Between the wars

In 1918 in a training camp in Suffolk he met Mary Daines, whom he married that same year. Their daughter Joy was born in July 1919, but died as an infant after an infection. He processed her death in poems such as The Child's Grave and To Joy . The latter was set to music by his composer friend Gerald Finzi . That year he met Siegfried Sassoon , then literary editor of the Daily Herald , to whom he had sent some of his first poems. Sassoon came from the same part of England and shared Blunden's passion for hunting and cricket . Their deep friendship, which lasted over forty years, is reflected in an extensive correspondence. He also became acquainted with Thomas Hardy through Sassoon .

Blunden continued his studies at Oxford, but switched from ancient languages ​​to English literature. Although he had already had a large number of publications in scientific journals, primarily on John Clare, the fees were insufficient to support his family. He accepted an offer to work in London as a journalist for The Athenaeum and The Nation . Around 1920 he put together his first volume of poetry, The Wagoner , which after its publication received considerable attention, also from Hardy and the poet Walter de la Mare .

In 1920 his second daughter Clare was born, a year later their son John; The children took their first names after John Clare. During his research, Blunden discovered a number of as yet unpublished poems, which he published under the title Poems Chiefly from Manuscript . The edition aroused widespread interest in Clare's posthumous works.

Blunden's health had already been damaged by the traumatic experiences of war and the uncompromising loss of his daughter Joy. Domestic difficulties with his wife made them worse. Friends persuaded him to go to Buenos Aires . His travelogue was published in 1922 under the title The Bonaventure . Still, the trip did not improve his condition. On his return to England, Blunden was surprised by the news that he had been awarded the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for the book of poetry The Shepherd .

In April 1924, Blunden accepted a professorship for English at the University of Tokyo . This position was brought to him by the Keats researcher Takeshi Saito, from then on Bunden's lifelong friend. He stayed in Japan until July 1927 . Meanwhile, Blunden tried to give his students access to Western culture. His wife had stayed in England with the children. Their relationship worsened when Blunden brought his Japanese secretary home with him, so they finally divorced in 1931. The years from 1927 to 1931 were characterized by Blunden's abundance of work and literary success, but also by his steadily deteriorating health. He had suffered from asthma as a child .

In 1930 Blunden retired to Hawstead (Suffolk) to live with his brother Gilbert and his German wife. He resumed a position as assistant editor at The Nation . The following year he returned to Yalding for a short time to prepare for the publication of Wilfred Owen's poems. Like his rediscovery of Clares, he created a larger readership for Owen for the first time. In October 1931 he became a Fellow and English Lecturer at Merton College , Oxford. In 1932 Blunden married his fellow critic Sylva Norman.

World War II and Pacifism

Sylva joined the army in 1939. Blunden himself refused any armed conflict. In April 1940, he wrote in the Times that he disapproved of plans to bomb German cities and the inevitable deaths of civilians. The reaction was a house search of his sister-in-law, during which the police confiscated Blunden's correspondence with Sylva and searched his library. He had no political interest. He also refused to take a stand on the pacifism of the late 1930s . Public opinion assumed he was sympathetic to National Socialism , as it later declared him a communist when he visited the People's Republic of China in the 1950s .

His conviction of the fundamental goodness of human beings and the consequent necessity to prevent war at all costs, repeatedly led to misunderstandings in the public. Blunden tried again and again through writings, speeches and mediating visits to Germany to prevent another outbreak of war. He did not describe himself as a political voice, but as an intermediary between people. He was deeply disappointed when England ignored his warnings and entered World War II .

Cultural mediator in Asia

After the war, Blunden divorced again and married a third time in 1945. His wife became Claire Poynting, whom he had met years earlier as an English student at St Hilda's College . He joined the Times Literary Supplement as a contributor . His daughter Margaret was born in 1946. He received calls from Chinese and Korean universities, but Blunden decided to go back to Japan as a cultural advisor. He followed his conviction that literature could create peace more easily than politics.

The scholar's reputation preceded his second visit to Japan in 1947. He had a large number of official invitations to give speeches and more than 600 lectures as part of the cultural exchange. Blunden became a representative of English culture. His lectures were published, and in 1950 the Japanese Academy elected him a member. Memorial plaques with Blunden's verses can still be found all over the country today.

After returning to England in 1950, he turned to the Imperial War Graves Commission (since 1960 Commonwealth War Graves Commission ), the British organization for the care of war graves, and visited the theaters of war in Italy and Normandy several times .

The lasting friendship with the composer Gerald Finzi led to the fact that they were allowed to write a work together on the coronation of Elizabeth II in 1953 .

As editor, Blunden has now obtained a first selection of poems by Ivor Gurney and an edition by Percy Bysshe Shelley . He turned down a chair in poetry at Oxford, as well as the vice-chancellorship of the university.

The last few years

Three other daughters were born to the couple, Lucy (* 1948), Frances (* 1950) and Catherine (* 1956). Blunden took a vacant professorship in English at Hong Kong University and moved with his family to the Crown Colony in September 1953. From there he made two trips to China, where he met Zhou Enlai , and further trips to Europe to the sites of the former battles of Flanders .

In 1956 Blunden was awarded the Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry , and in 1957 he published a complete edition of his poems. In 1962 he published his last volume of poetry with A Hong Kong House .

In 1964 he retired with his family in Long Melford, Suffolk, but continued to participate in literary life and work on his later poetic work.

In 1966 he was awarded the professorship for poetry in Oxford, from which he resigned the following year - his long-time friend Siegfried Sassoon had died and memories of the First World War never left him. Blunden finished his work in 1967.

poetry

A large part of Blunden's poems takes on the psychological - philosophical interpretation of timeless topics, for example nature and the relationship between people and people, people in war - especially the instinct for destruction , which can lead to betrayal of the will for peace - and the soldier's comrade spirit in battle, finally to recognize the meaning, “undertones” and paradoxes of life in order to finally understand the human will through a deeper self-knowledge .

Although Blunden like Sassoon and Owen also wrote war poems, he avoided their drastic clarity. Despite their literary beauty, his war memoirs are considered less haunting compared to Sassoon or Robert Graves . Blunden's memories emphasize less the horrors of war, they are written with more understatement and more subjective.

Works

As an author

• Poems 1913 and 1914 (translations from French), 1914
• The Harbingers , 1916
• Pastorals , 1916
• The Wagoner , 1920
• The Shepherd and Other Poems of Peace and War , 1922
• The Bonadventure , 1922
• Christ's Hospital: a Retrospect 1923
• Masks of Time , 1925
• English Poems , 1926
• Retreat , 1928
• Leigh Hunt's Examiner Examined. An account of the newspaper, extracts and commentary , 1928
• Japanese Garland , 1928
• Undertones of War , 1928
• Near and Far , 1929
• Leigh Hunt , 1930
• De Bello Germanico , 1930
• Votive Tablets: Studies Chiefly Appreciative of English Authors and Books , 1931
• The Face of England , 1932
• A Halfway House , 1932
• Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries , 1932
• We'll Shift Our Ground , 1933 (with Sylva Blunden)
• The Mind's Eye , 1934
• Choice or Chance , 1934
• To Elegy and Other Poems , 1937
• Poems 1930-1940 , 1941
• English Villages , 1941
• Thomas Hardy . In: English Men of Letters , 1942
• Cricket Country , 1942
• Shells by a Stream , 1942
• Shelley , 1946
• After the Bombing , 1949
• John Keats . In: Writers and their Works , 1950
• Edmund Blunden: a Selection of his Poetry and Prose , 1950
• Charles Lamb . In: Writers and their Works , 1954
• Poems of Many Years , 1957
• Was Poets 1914-1918 , 1958
• A Hong Kong House , 1962
• Eleven Poems , 1966
• The Midnight Skaters: Poems for young readers , 1968

As editor

• Poems Chiefly from Manuscript (John Clare), 1920
• A Song to David by Christopher Smart (Christopher Smart), 1924
• Shelley and Keats: As they struck their Contemporaries , 1925
• On the Poems of Henry Vaughan , 1927
• Poems of William Collins , 1929
• Sketches in the Life of John Clare , 1931
• Poems of Wilfred Owen , 1931
• Poems by Ivor Gurney , 1954

literature

• Hardie, Alec M .: Edmund Blunden . London 1958
• Rolf Giese: Edmund Blunden's poetry. Traditionalistic approach and modern experience of reality. Studienverlag Brockmeyer, Bochum 1982, ISBN 3-88339-273-1 .
• Thomas Mallon: Edmund Blunden . Boston 1983
• Barry Webb: Edmund Blunden. A biography . New Haven 1990 ISBN 0-300-04634-0
• Helen McPhail / Philip Guest: Edmund Blunden . Barnsley (South Yorkshire), 1999 ISBN 0-85052-678-7
• Astrid Erll: memory novels . Literature on the First World War as a medium for English and German cultures of remembrance in the 1920s . Trier 2003 ISBN 3-88476-610-4
• John Greening (Ed.): Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War , Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2015, ISBN 978-0-19-871661-7

Web links

• Literature by and about Edmund Blunden in the catalog of the German National Library
• Edmund Blunden at War (English)
• edmundblunden.org (English)