Early Life
He was born in Colchester, Essex. He served as an officer in the British Army in World War I, having joined the Artists' Rifles in 1916, being awarded a Military Cross.
On 4 January 1919, Rickword developed an illness that was diagnosed as a "general vascular invasion which had resulted in general septicaemia". His left eye was so badly infected that they thought it necessary to remove it to prevent the infection from spreading to the other eye.
He was a published war poet, and collected his early verse in Behind the Eyes (1921). Artists Rifles, an audiobook published in 2004, includes two poems read by Rickword: Winter Warfare and The Soldier Addresses His Body. Both were recorded during the 1970s. Other war poets heard on the CD include Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, David Jones and Lawrence Binyon. Rickword can also be heard on Memorial Tablet, an audiobook of readings by Sassoon issued in 2003.
He went up to the University of Oxford in 1919, staying only four terms reading French literature, and leaving when he married. Literary friends from this period included mainly other ex-soldiers: Anthony Bertram, Edmund Blunden, Vivian de Sola Pinto, A. E. Coppard, Louis Golding, Robert Graves, L. P. Hartley, and Alan Porter. His work appeared in the Oxford Poetry 1921 anthology, with Blunden, Golding, Porter, Graves, Richard Hughes, and Frank Prewett.
Read more about this topic: Edgell Rickword
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