[3] In September 1915, over a year after the outbreak of World War I, Blunden was commissioned as a temporary second lieutenant into the British Army's Royal Sussex Regiment.

He served with the battalion on the Western Front to the end of the war, taking part in the actions at Ypres and the Somme, followed in 1917 by the Battle of Passchendaele.

In January 1917, and by now a temporary lieutenant (having been promoted to that rank in September 1916),[5] he was awarded the Military Cross (MC), the citation for which reads: For conspicuous gallantry in action.

[6]Blunden survived nearly two years in the front line without physical injury (despite being gassed in October 1917[7]), but for the rest of his life, he bore mental scars from his experiences.

[2] On the same English literature course was Robert Graves, and the two were close friends during their time at Oxford together, but Blunden found university life unsatisfactory and left in 1920 to take up a literary career, at first acting as assistant to Middleton Murry on the Athenaeum.

[2] Blunden's next book of poems, The Shepherd, published in 1922, won the Hawthornden Prize, but his poetry, though well reviewed, did not provide enough to live on.

[2][10] During his years in Oxford, Blunden published extensively: several collections of poetry including Choice or Chance (1934) and Shells by a Stream (1944), prose works on Charles Lamb; Edward Gibbon; Leigh Hunt; Percy Bysshe Shelley (Shelley: A Life Story); John Taylor; and Thomas Hardy; and a book about a game he loved, Cricket Country (1944).

In 1966, he was nominated for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry in succession to Graves; with some misgivings, he agreed to stand and was elected by a large majority over the other candidate, Robert Lowell.

As Blunden says, "The game which made me write at all, is not terminated at the boundary, but is reflected beyond, is echoed and varied out there among the gardens and the barns, the dells and the thickets, and belongs to some wider field.

[16] His fellow poets' regard for Blunden was illustrated by the contributions to a dinner in his honour for which poems were specially written by Cecil Day-Lewis and William Plomer; T. S. Eliot and Walter de la Mare were guests; and Sassoon provided the Burgundy.

[20] Poetry Biographical books on romantic figures: Memoir: Artists Rifles, an audiobook CD published in 2004, includes a reading of Concert Party, Busseboom by Blunden himself, recorded in 1964 by the British Council.

Other World War I poets heard on the CD include Siegfried Sassoon, Edgell Rickword, Graves, David Jones, and Lawrence Binyon.