Ivor Gurney was born in 1890, in Gloucester (England), the son of a tailor. His musical talents were recognised at an early age and, thanks to the encouragement and financial support of a local clergyman, Gurney was enrolled at King's School, Gloucester in 1906. Even at this young age Gurney, despite the steadying influence of musical colleagues (one of whom was Herbert Howells), his passion for what his friend, Will Harvey, called "the very fact of being Gloucester bred", and his deep love of the local countryside, was plagued by poor health, reckless solitariness and a confused egoism that made him passionately independent at times, but also vulnerable and unoriginal in his remarks.

In 1911 Gurney won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music in London to study composition under Sir Charles Stanford. Gurney was an unpredictable, unteachable and dazzling pupil. Stanford later remarked that, of all his pupils (who included Ralph Vaughan Williams, John Ireland and Arthur Bliss), Gurney was potentially "the biggest of them all". Unfortunately it was whilst at the Royal College that Gurney began to show the first signs of the mental instability which later destroyed his life. However, during his time at the Royal College Gurney also achieved his first real success : a setting of five Elizabethan lyrics. And it was here too that his sense of Englishness was heightened further - in music, by his increased exposure to the works of Elgar and Vaughan Williams; and in poetry, by the opportunity to meet and hear the Georgian poets whom Edward Marsh was promoting.

At the outbreak of the war, Gurney volunteered for the army, only to be rejected owing to his poor eyesight. But in February 1915 he was accepted and joined the Gloucester Regiment as a private soldier. His career as a composer was stunted by the outbreak of the War; after reaching France in May 1916, Gurney found time to compose no more than five songs as he saw action with his Regiment along much of the British-held Front, getting wounded in the arm in April 1917 (three days before Edward Thomas was killed), and gassed near Passchendaele in the September (1917). Instead of composing sings at the Front, Gurney became more intensely interested in writing poems, and his two collections Severn and Somme (1917) and War's Embers (1919) contain several of the lyrics on which his reputation still stands - such as To His Love and Song (Only the Wanderer).

Gurney was sent home after being gassed, and moved from hospital to hospital, but whilst his physical condition was not that serious, his mental health deteriorated. In Spring 1918 he had a major breakdown, and in October (1918), after a series of suicide letters, he was discharged from the army, suffering from "deferred shellshock".

Whilst it is impossible to say how far the War was responsible for Gurney's future mental history, if there was an instability there already in his make-up, his experience of France and the unsettling aftermath of the War seem to have precipitated the crisis. For the four years following his army discharge Gurney drifted in and out of both health and work, doing various menial jobs. Finally in September 1922, despite all the help and concern of his friends, he was committed by his family to a mental asylum, first in Gloucester and then in Dartford, suffering from schizophrenia. He remained there until his death, fifteen years later in 1937.

Gurney will be remembered most as a composer, but since Edmund Blunden's 1954 edition of Gurney's poems, his stock as a poet, both of the War and of his native Gloucestershire, has continued to rise. Besides his 1917 and 1919 collections Gurney wrote much poetry during his asylum years. His poetic preoccupations were those of the Georgian poets - sanctity of place, the threat of change, the delights of seclusion, the barbarism of conflict - but his treatment of these themes is recognisably modern. Like Edward Thomas, whom he admired greatly, Gurney's work forms a link between Victorian and contemporary sensibilities. And also like Thomas - and so many of the other War poets, Gurney drew from his deep and very particular love of the English landscape as a contrast to the horrors of the Front Line.

For a biography of Ivor Gurney see The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney by Michael Hurd (Oxford, 1978). Click on these links to see the text of the following poems - Silent One and To His Love. For a really good site devoted to Gurney, see the Ivor Gurney site.

© Michèle Fry, 1998.

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