Question

the subject matter of the Poetry of Charles Sorely,     Siegfried Sassoon, Robert graves and Edmund Blunden

Answer 1

Edmund Charles Blunden was born in London, England in 1896 and grew up in the rural village of Yalding, Kent, where his parents were schoolteachers from 1900 to 1912. The places of Blunden’s birth and upbringing are symbolic of the two poles between which his adult life in England moved: the literary, intellectual, and scholarly circles centered in London and Oxford, and the English countryside which he celebrated in prose and poetry throughout his career. It was writers in “the country tradition,” as Blunden called it, that drew his most memorable essays and books. Both as a scholar at Oxford and as a literary journalist in London, Blunden tried to preserve and promote an awareness of England’s rural tradition in a population becoming, to Blunden’s distress, increasingly urbanized.
 
Blunden’s link with England’s southern countryside was further strengthened at the age of 17, when his parents left Yalding for teaching posts at the Framfield School in Sussex, a county rich in literary associations that worked their way into his writings. As Thomas Mallon points out, “Charles Blunden the cricketer, angler, kind and competent schoolmaster and churchman—this is the essential figure in the pre-1914 village landscape that Edmund Blunden was to celebrate as his ideal for half a century.” He attended Christ’s Hospital School, and Blunden’s earliest poems, in the pastoral tradition, appeared in the school magazine, the Blue. He later dedicated much of his criticism and scholarship to the famous men of letters who preceded him at the school, particularly Charles Lamb, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Leigh Hunt.