Edmund Charles Blunden was born in London on 1 November 1896 to Charles and Georgina Tyler Blunden, but his family moved to the village of Yalding, Kent, in 1900, providing Blunden with one of the more enduring aspects of his poetry, the love of the English countryside. His family was always in straitened financial circumstances, but he was a bright and promising student and was admitted in 1909 to Christ's Hospital, a venerable and famous school that subsidized gifted students from poor families. The Christ's Hospital experience was one of the most profound and lasting influences on Blunden's life, memory, and imagination. By 1914 he was the ranking student at Christ's, meaning that he would be subsidized to study in a university. He enrolled in Queen's College, Oxford; in 1915 he left school to join the Eleventh Royal Sussex Regiment, which in 1916 was sent to the front lines in France. He saw much action...