Collected Poems Of Ivor Gurney

The last few years have seen the rise of Ivor Gurney as one of the finest World War I poets. The 1982 publication of the Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney helped to establish him as a major literary figure, as it brought together an abundance of his work, inspired by his native Gloucestershire, the war, and his personal descent into madness after World War I. This collection of poems, published in the centenary of Gurney's birth, provides a selection of his most successful pieces.

P.J. Kavanagh's 1982 edition of the Collected Poems established Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) as one of the most original poets of the early twentieth century. His experiences in the First World War, his love of his native Gloucestershire countryside were sources of a unique poetic voice: Vigorous, lyrical and passionate. In this new, substantially revised edition, Gurney can be enjoyed in his entirety by a new generation of readers. The poems have been re-ordered to take into account new work on Gurney, the texts corrected from the archive and editorial material substantially revised, while retaining P.J. Kavanagh's extensive original introduction.

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. Carefully selected by Jon Stallworthy, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Oxford, these poems comprise a landmark publication that reflects the disparate experiences of war through the voices of the soldiers themselves. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The first comprehensive biography of an extraordinary English poet and composer whose life was haunted by fighting in the First World War and, later, confinement in a mental asylum Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) wrote some of the most anthologized poems of the First World War and composed some of the greatest works in the English song repertoire, such as “Sleep.” Yet his life was shadowed by the trauma of the war and mental illness, and he spent his last fifteen years confined to a mental asylum. In Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy presents the first comprehensive biography of this extraordinary and misunderstood artist. A promising student at the Royal College of Music, Gurney enlisted as a private with the Gloucestershire regiment in 1915 and spent two years in the trenches of the Western Front. Wounded in the arm and subsequently gassed during the Battle of Passchendaele, Gurney was recovering in hospital when his first collection of poems, Severn and Somme, was published. Despite episodes of depression, he resumed his music studies after the war until he was committed to an asylum in 1922. At times believing he was Shakespeare and that the “machines under the floor” were torturing him, he nevertheless continued to write and compose, leaving behind a vast body of unpublished work when he died of tuberculosis. Drawing on extensive archival research and spanning literary criticism, history, psychiatry and musicology, this compelling narrative sets Gurney’s life and work against the backdrop of the war and his institutionalisation, probing the links between madness, suffering and creativity. Facing death in the trenches, Gurney hoped that history might not “forget me quite.” This definitive account of his life and work helps ensure that he will indeed be remembered.

A collection of more than 460 of the letters of the English poet and composer, Ivor Gurney - many of them not previously published.

In prose and poetry the selections contained here reveal the personal experiences, feelings and angst of three English writers who lived through World War I.