Edmund Blunden VE Day poem published after 75 years

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-52556965

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A poem about VE Day written by acclaimed war poet Edmund Blunden has been published for the first time.

Blunden wrote poetry about his first-hand experiences in World War One, but upon Nazi Germany's surrender in 1945 he was moved to write a new poem.

His daughter Margi Blunden said the family were "surprised and pleased" to find out about its existence.

Tony Richards at the Imperial War Museum (IWM) described the poem, titled V Day, as "superb".

Blunden was offered a scholarship to study at Oxford University in 1914, but a year later he volunteered for the army, seeing combat on the frontline from 1916 to 1918.

He took part in some of the worst fighting of the war on the Somme and at Ypres.

After the war he took up his place at Oxford but he left a year later to take up writing.

He wrote an account of the conflict, Undertones of War, including poems written while he was still at the front.

Blunden also became an academic, and it was in between tutoring at Merton College at Oxford University and taking up a post at the The Times Literary Supplement that he wrote V Day.

He was living in Tonbridge, Kent, at the time.

Mr Richards, head of documents and sound at IWM, described Blunden as incredibly important and "one of the absolute key writers on the First World War".

He said V Day came from an unusual angle as it was a poem "concerning the end of the Second World War written by someone associated with the First World War".

"It shows you how veterans of the first conflict still had a lot of very interesting and important things to say about the second one," Mr Richards added.

Margi Blunden called it an "important poem for our times or for any time".

"You realise he's asking us a question - 'what does victory actually mean?'," she said.

"In order to honour the memory of those who made the ultimate sacrifice we have to work out how to solve conflicts without war, and only then can we say we have come through," she said.

Ms Blunden said her father was a poet "who often used irony and so a lot of his war poems are infused with irony, and I think this poem is too".

Blunden went on to become Professor of Poetry at Oxford in 1966. He died at his home in 1974 aged 77.

The museum, as part of a programme to digitise its material, has made V Day available to read online.

It bought the poem at auction, but said it was a "mystery" why it had never seen print.