ABSTRACT
Augustine Birrell rises to introduce their speaker, the soldier-poet Edmund Blunden, who has returned from the land of flowers to address the Society on Leigh Hunt. Hunt's pacifism held understandable appeal after the First World War, and not least to Blunden, who survived the Western Front and would publish his recollections, Undertones of War, in 1928. The Charles Lamb Society is gathering at Bedford Square. Woolf was also an admirer of Charles Lamb, whose Essays of Elia she pronounced unsurpassed by any other writer. To suggest how Hunt's post-prison trauma explains his appeal to Virginia Woolf, who also experienced mental suffering and channelled this into her creative life, here are two versions of Hunt's years in Italy. Abrams, there is another tradition of English lyricism in which we find poets such as John Betjeman, Edmund Blunden, Andrew Motion, and Edward Thomas all of them inheritors of the more sociable Romanticism first announced in the poetry and prose of Leigh Hunt.
