Blunt, WILFRID SCAWEN

Blunt, WILFRID SCAWEN, traveller and poet, was born near Crawley in 1840. His mother being a Catholic convert, he was educated at Stoneyhurst and St Mary's, Oscott. He served for some years as attaché to various British embassies in Europe; married in 1869 Anne, daughter of the Earl of Lovelace, and granddaughter of Lord Byron; and thereafter travelled through Spain, Algeria, Egypt, and the Syrian desert, as recorded in Lady Anne Blunt's Bedouins of the Euphrates. In 1882 he championed the cause of Arabi Pasha in Egypt. The same sympathy with national aspirations afterwards plunged him into the Nationalist cause in Ireland, and led to his being imprisoned for two months in 1887-88 for taking part in a prohibited meeting in County Galway. Blunt is the author of several volumes of verse, Sonnets and Songs, the Love Sonnets of Proteus (the last containing poetry of really striking merit), Esther, Love Lyrics, The Wind and the Whirlwind (on Egyptian affairs), In Vineulis, Satan Absolved (1899), &c. A selection of his poetry was edited in 1898 by Henley and Wyndham.