Edmund Charles Blunden was born in London on 1 November 1896 to Charles and Georgina Tyler Blunden but 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 verse throughout his career. It was writers in "the country tradition" (as Blunden called it) that drew his most memorable essays and books, and 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 in 1913 when his parents left Yalding for...