Blunden was the author of over a thousand poems, more than three thousand articles and reviews, and biographies of Shelly and Leigh Hunt, and he was the first major editor of John Clare and Wilfred Owen. Webb describes this active literary life and provides an account of Blunden's many influential friendships ( with Siegfried Sassoon, for example), of his three marriages and seven children, and of the intriguing relationship with his Japanese secretary.