Ivor Gurney

Gurney himself thought of music as his true vocation: "The brighter visions brought music; the fainter verse".

• Name — Ivor Gurney • Birth Name — Ivor Bertie Gurney • Born — 28 August 1890 • Birthplace — Gloucester, United Kingdom • Died — 26 December 1937 • Resting Place — St Matthew's Church, Twigworth • Monuments — * Gloucester Cathedral • Gloucester Docks • St Mary de Lode Church, Gloucester • Hazeweidestraat, Sint-Juliaan, Belgium • Education — The King's School, Gloucester Royal College of Music • Occupation — Composer, poet, organist, soldier

Ivor Gurney was born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester, in 1890, as the second of four surviving children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress. He showed musical ability at an early age. He sang as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral from 1900 to 1906, when he became an articled pupil of Herbert Brewer at the cathedral. There he met fellow composer Herbert Howells, who became a lifelong friend. Alongside Gurney and Howells, Brewer's third pupil at this time was Ivor Novello, then known as Ivor Davies. He also enjoyed an enduring friendship with the poet F. W. Harvey, whom he met in 1908. The adults of most significance in Gurney's early life were the Rev. Alfred H. Cheesman, and two sisters, Emily and Margaret Hunt, who nurtured Gurney's interests in music and literature. Gurney began composing music at the age of 14, and won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in 1911. He studied there with Charles Villiers Stanford, who also taught Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland, Marion Scott, Rebecca Clarke, Frank Bridge, Arthur Bliss, Herbert Howells and many others. Stanford told Howells that Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all", but he was "unteachable". Gurney possessed a dynamic personality, but he had been troubled by mood swings that became apparent during his teenage years. He had a difficult time focusing on his work at college and suffered his first breakdown in 1913. After taking a rest, he seemed to recover and returned to college. Gurney's studies were interrupted by World War I, when he enlisted as a private soldier in the Gloucestershire Regiment in February 1915. At the front, he began writing poetry seriously, sending his efforts to his friend, the musicologist and critic Marion Scott, who worked with Gurney as his editor and business manager. He was in the midst of writing the poems for what would become his first book, Severn and Somme, when he was wounded in the shoulder in April 1917. He recovered and returned to battle, still working on his book and composing music, including the songs "In Flanders" and "By A Bierside". Sidgwick & Jackson accepted Severn and Somme in July, with publication set for the autumn. In the meantime, Gurney was gassed in September the same year and sent to the Edinburgh War Hospital, where he met and fell in love with a VAD nurse, Annie Nelson Drummond, but the relationship later broke down. There remains some controversy about the possible effects of the gas on his mental health, even though Gurney had clearly shown signs and symptoms of a bipolar disorder since his teens. "Being gassed (mildly) [his parenthesis] with the new gas is no worse than catarrh or a bad cold," Gurney wrote in a letter to Marion Scott on 17 September 1917. After his release from hospital, he was posted to Seaton Delaval, a mining village in Northumberland, where he wrote poems, including "Lying Awake in the Ward". His volume Severn and Somme was published in November 1917.

In March 1918, Gurney suffered a serious mental breakdown, triggered at least in part by the sudden ending of his relationship with Drummond. He was hospitalised in the Gallery Ward at Brancepeth Castle, County Durham, where he wrote several songs, despite the piano sounding, he said, like "a boiler factory in full swing because of the stone walls". In June he threatened suicide, but he did not attempt it. Gurney slowly regained some of his emotional stability and in October was honourably discharged from the army. Gurney received an unconventional diagnosis of nervous breakdown from "deferred" shell shock. The notion that Gurney's instability should primarily be attributed to "shell shock" was perpetuated by Marion Scott, who used this term in the initial press releases after Gurney's death, as well as in his entry for Grove's Dictionary of Music and Musicians. Gurney seemed to thrive after the war and was regarded as one of the most promising men of his generation, but his mental distress continued to worsen. He studied for a brief time with Ralph Vaughan Williams upon returning to the Royal College of Music, but he withdrew from the college before completing his studies. His second volume of poetry, War's Embers, appeared in May 1919 to mixed reviews. He continued to compose, producing a large number of songs, instrumental pieces, chamber music, and two works for orchestra: War Elegy (1920) and A Gloucestershire Rhapsody (1919–1921). His music was being performed and published. However, by 1922, his condition had deteriorated to the point where his family had him declared insane. It has been speculated that Gurney's mental problems may have resulted from syphilis, contracted either while he was a music student before the war, or perhaps while serving as a soldier in France. Blevins, Gurney's biographer, however, concludes that he did not suffer from syphilis. The issue has also been discussed, more recently, by Cambridge academic and broadcaster Kate Kennedy. Gurney spent the last 15 years of his life in psychiatric hospitals, first for a short period at Barnwood House in Gloucester, and then at the City of London Mental Hospital, Dartford, where he was diagnosed as suffering from "delusional insanity (systematised)". Gurney wrote prolifically during the asylum years, producing some eight collections of verse. His output included two plays in Shakespearean style – Gloucester Play (1926) and The Tewkesbury Trial (1926). During this time he appeared to believe himself to be William Shakespeare in person. He continued also to compose music but to a far lesser degree. An examination of his archive suggests that up to two-thirds of his musical output remains unpublished and unrecorded. By the 1930s Gurney wrote little of anything, although he was described by Scott as being "so sane in his insanity".

Edmund Blunden, at the urging of Gerald Finzi, assembled the first collection of Gurney's poetry which was published in 1954. This was followed by P. J. Kavanagh's Collected Poems, first published in 1982 and reissued in 2004. It remains the most comprehensive edition of Gurney's poetry. Gurney is regarded as one of the great World War I poets, and like others of them, such as Edward Thomas, whom he admired, he often contrasted the horrors of the front line with the beauty and tranquillity of his native English landscape – these themes were explored in the 2012 musical play A Soldier and a Maker. Deliberately unrhetorical in his poetic tone, and writing as a ranker, not an officer, Gurney offered a complex, wry, unheroic view of the soldierly world of the Western Front: presenting not a large statement (for or against war), but an individual experience. Without diminishing the horrors of the front line, Gurney's poems often emphasise the moments of relief. "On Rest" was above all what he called "the relief of knowing mere being". By detailing the "small trifles" of trench life – moments of comradeship, letters from home, singsongs, bread and Fray Bentos corned beef, wine, chocolate and café-au-lait Gurney was able (in Blunden's words) to "express part of the Western Front secret... with distinctive, intimate and imaginative quickness." In so far as he had a "manifesto", it was to present "the protest of the physical against the exalted spiritual; of the cumulative weight of small facts against the one large". At the same time, Gurney was something of a local poet, rooted in Gloucester and its surroundings, which remained a touchstone of reality for him, in the front line and later in the asylum. In the preface to his first book, he wrote of "my county, Gloucester, that whether I live or die stays always with me." His tribute poem "Crickley Hill" was described by Edna Longley as "perhaps Gurney's most rapturous expression of local patriotism".

The following poems provide an introduction to his work: • "Strange Hells" – The effect of war on soldiers' psyches • "The Ballad of Three Spectres" – A soldier's vision • "Maisemore" – A soldier thinks of home • "The Estaminet" – Comradeship • "Purple and Black" – The politics of death • "To the Poet before Battle" – A soldier poet prepares for the fight • "To His Love" – A soldier writes to a dead comrade's lover of his death • "The Silent One" – An account of a moment of terror during a battle

• "Orpheus" (John Fletcher) • "Sleep" (John Fletcher) • "Spring" (Thomas Nashe) • "Tears" (John Fletcher) • "Under the Greenwood Tree" (William Shakespeare)

Collections: Ludlow and Teme (1923) LT; Lights Out (1926) LO; The Western Playland (1926) WP; A First Volume of Ten Songs (1938) T1; A Second Volume of Ten Songs (1938) T2; A Third Volume of Ten Songs (1952) T3; A Fourth Volume of Ten Songs (1959) T4; A Fifth Volume of Ten Songs (1979) T5; Seven Sappho Songs (1998) SS

The following is established of the heading itself.

• Severn & Somme, 1917 • War's Embers, 1919 • Poems by Ivor Gurney, 78 poems selected by Edmund Blunden, 1954 • Poems of Ivor Gurney, 1890-1937, 140 poems selected by Leonard Clark, 1973 • Collected Poems, ed. P. J. Kavanagh, 292 poems, 1982 • War Letters, ed. R.K.R. Thornton. Carcanet Press, 1983 • Collected Letters, ed. R.K.R. Thornton. Carcanet Press 1991 • Best Poems and The Book of Five Makings, ed. R.K.R. Thornton. Carcanet Press, 1995 • Severn & Somme and War's Embers, ed. R. K. R. Thornton. Carcanet Press, 1997 • 80 Poems or So, ed. George Walter and R. K. R. Thornton. Carcanet Press, 1997 • Rewards of Wonder: Poems of London, Cotswold and France, ed. George Walter. Carcanet Press, 2000 • Collected Poems (new edition, substantially revised and reordered) ed. P.J. Kavanagh. Fyfield Books (Carcanet Press), 2004 • Stars in a Dark Night: The Letters from Ivor Gurney to the Chapman Family. Anthony Boden (ed.), The History Press, 2004 (2nd edition) • The Complete Poetical Works, Vol 1 ed. Philip Lancaster and Tim Kendall, Oxford University Press, 2020 (first of a projected five volume set).