Edmund Charles Blunden

Edmund Charles Blunden 1896-1974, English author. Beginning his career as a poet of nature, Blunden became a cosmopolitan teacher and writer. His prose works include Undertones of War (1928), an account of his experiences in World War I, and a study of World War I poets (1962); also biographical and critical studies of Leigh Hunt (1930), Charles Lamb (1933), and Shelley (1946). From 1966 to 1968 he served as professor of poetry at Oxford.

Blunden, Edmund Charles (1896–1974), poet and scholar. In 1914 he experienced war in the trenches and later wrote poems, such as ‘Third Ypres’, and ‘Report on Experience’, now highly regarded. In 1920 he published a small edition of MS poems of Clare. Volumes of poems largely of rural life include The Waggoner (1920), The Shepherd (1922), and English Poems (1925). His best-known work, Undertones of War (1928), describes the double destruction of man and nature in Flanders. His first Collected Poems appeared in 1930, as did a biography of Leigh Hunt. In 1931 he produced a collected edition of the work of W. Owen. Further volumes of his own poems were collected as Poems 1930–1940; a study of Hardy appeared in 1941, and a biography of Shelley in 1946. He published a volume of poems, After the Bombing (1950), more contemplative and searching than his previous work. In 1954 he produced an edition of the almost unknown I. Gurney. He was appointed professor of poetry at Oxford in 1966.

Kean, Edmund (1787?–1833), actor. The first great English performer to visit America while still at the height of his powers, he made his debut at the Anthony Street Theatre in 1820 as Richard III, the most popular Shakespearean role of his era. The Evening Post remarked, “We saw the most complete actor . . . that ever appeared on our boards,” continuing, “Mr. Kean appears to be beneath the middle size . . . his features are good and his eye particularly expressive and commanding; his voice, in which he is most deficient, is, however, in its lower tones, sonorous, and he has the power of throwing it out so as to be heard at the extremity of the house.” He followed his Richard with Othello, Shylock, Brutus (in Payne's tragedy), Hamlet, Sir Giles Overreach, King Lear, and Macbeth. Kean performed for a percentage of the gross and for many nights received £125, far and away the highest figure yet paid to a performer in America. However, his tour ran into problems when he refused to appear before an uncrowded house in Boston later in the season. The brouhaha that ensued prompted him to leave the country. After he returned in 1825 less temperate journals revived the controversy, and when he attempted to appear again as Richard at the Park Theatre a riot broke out. He soon mollified playgoers and acted across the country for the rest of the season and part of the next, but he never again revisited America. Biography: Edmund Kean: The Story of an Actor, W. J. Macqueen‐Pope, 1960. His son Charles [John] KEAN (1811–68) had only begun his career as an actor when he made his American debut at the Park Theatre in 1830 as Richard III, then continued by offering many of the same parts associated with his father. He later returned to America three times and, with his wife Ellen Tree, presented a repertory of standard classic favorites interspersed with such once popular contemporary works as The Hunchback and The Iron Chest. James E. Murdoch recalled, “Charles Kean was an imitator of his father's style of acting. But to the method which made the elder Kean famous the son added a grace and finish that gave repose and beauty to what would otherwise have been a mere copy. . . . Of all our tragedians of the analytic and passionate order, approaching the mechanical in execution, Charles Kean may be said to have been the most finished, and yet the most earnest.” Biography: The Life and Theatrical Times of Charles Kean, John W. Cole, 1859.