Background
Ivor Gurney was born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester, in 1890, the second of four surviving children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress.
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.
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.
(An essential new collection of poetry from the First Worl...)
An essential new collection of poetry from the First World War This indispensable anthology brings together the works of three major poets from the First World War. Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) was a classical music composer and poet who published two volumes of poems, Severn and Somme and War's Embers. Wilfred Owen's (1893- 1918) realistic poetry is remarkable for its details of war and combat. Isaac Rosenberg's (1890-1918) Poems from the Trenches is widely considered one of the finest examples of war poetry from the period.
https://www.amazon.com/Three-Poets-First-Penguin-Classics/dp/0141182075/?tag=2022091-20
Ivor Gurney was born at 3 Queen Street, Gloucester, in 1890, the second of four surviving children of David Gurney, a tailor, and his wife Florence, a seamstress.
In 1899 Gurney was accepted into the local church choir. Showing exceptional interest and adequate ability in music, Gurney later won a place in Gloucester’s Cathedral Choir, a position that enabled him to transfer from the state school he had been attending to the cathedral school, where lessons in music theory, composition, and performance were mandatory; by age seventeen he was writing songs that displayed a marked degree of accomplishment and a developing individual style. 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.
When England went to war in the summer of 1914, Gurney volunteered for service and was inducted into the army the following February. He served in Flanders with the 2nd/5th Gloucester Regiment, taking part in the Somme Offensive of 1916 and in the Third Battle of Ypres (leper), among other engagements. Under the limitations imposed by trench life, poetry afforded a more practical creative outlet than music, and Gurney accordingly shifted his artistic focus to verse. He composed works during idle moments at the Front and mailed them to friends in England, who subsequently arranged for their publication. Wounded in April, 1917, and reinstated to active duty six weeks later, Gurney was gassed in September of that year and sent to Edinburgh to recuperate. While convalescing in an army hospital, he read the proofs of his first collection, "Severn and Somme."
The lingering physical and emotional effects of his gassing curtailed his active service, and he was treated for depression and delayed shell-shock before being discharged from the army in October, 1918. Returning to the Royal College of Music in 1919 to complete his scholarship, Gurney ultimately failed the final examination. His psychological condition deteriorated significantly in the postwar years: he became severely depressed and suffered from the delusion that unseen persecutors were torturing him with electrical shocks. He sought work in Gloucester, where he was staying with relatives, but was unable to maintain a job. During this time he wrote prolifically, and spent many nights wandering the countryside rather than sleeping.
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. He spent the last 15 years of his life in mental 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. He also continued to compose music, but to a far lesser degree. By the 1930s Gurney wrote little of anything, although he was described by Scott as being "so sane in his insanity." Gurney died of tuberculosis while still a patient at the City of London Mental Hospital, shortly before dawn on December 26, 1937, aged 47. He was buried in Twigworth, near Gloucester.
(An essential new collection of poetry from the First Worl...)
In the collections "Severn and Somme", published in 1917, and 1919’s "War's Embers", and "Other Verses", he described his experiences as a private on the Western Front during 1916 and 1917, focusing on seemingly inconsequential and unheroic moments in the lives of common soldiers rather than on the greater questions of the nature of war and its effects on humanity. In this way Gurney presented a balanced view — neither blindly patriotic nor bitterly remonstrative — of the life of the English private during World War I. His works also reflect his considerable musical talent and deep appreciation of natural beauty, especially that of his native Gloucestershire, while many disclose the mental illness that plagued him during the latter half of his life.
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. Gurney was "a lover and maker of beauty", as it said on his gravestone (now replaced after it was damaged — the original stone now stored inside Twigworth church).