Ivor Gurney’s recovery

By MICHAEL CAINES

As I mention in the latest episode of TLS Voices (embedded above), the Gloucester-born Ivor Gurney is an odd case among the war poets. . .

His first collection, Severn and Somme, appeared in 1917, while he was still a private with the Gloucesters, and the TLS, among other papers, welcomed it warmly. A second book, War's Embers (1919) seemed just as good in places, although prone to incoherence. The same TLS reviewer, Harold Hannyngton Child, thought some of it was journalism rather than poetry – although that didn't stop Child (presumably) recommending Gurney to write for the paper. Unfortunately, Gurney's publisher rejected a third collection, and in 1922 he was confined to a mental asylum, where he nonetheless continued to write both music and verse prolifically.

Posthumous reconsideration of Gurney's work has been gaining ground for some time, but only now is the great mass of unpublished material being edited as a whole for scholarly publication. One of Gurney's editors, Tim Kendall, writes about this Gloucestershire poet's woeful decline and astonishing creativity in this week's TLS, by way of an introduction to six previously unpublished Gurney poems. I've also chosen two of them to read as part of the episode above. They confirm for me a sense that this confined survivor of Ypres – one who was besotted with Beethoven and King Lear, the Cotswolds and nocturnal walks – had a great post-war battle to fight in the mind, a then-secret counterpoint to the published prose recollections of Robert Graves, the "strange clarity and dramatic suppleness" of In Parenthesis, and all the rest.

Round and round goes Gurney in his war-inspired verse, recasting "First Time In", mapping peaceful scenes behind the lines in French villages with memories of England, turning in his anguish from sing-song quatrains to not-quite-verse anecdotes – although, to be fair, his awkward unwillingness to revise away rough edges was apparent from the start. He thanks the music historian Marion Scott in Severn and Somme for helping to see his poems into print "in spite of my continued refusal to alter a word of anything" – and H. H. Child recognized that with opening lines such as "Wakened by birds and sun, laughter of the wind", some of Gurney's "metrical practices" were unlikely to "find favour with pedants". To the critic's mind, it didn't matter: "The 'general' reader will nearly always recognize Mr. Gurney's purpose in scrambling or dancing, instead of marching". A later editor, P. J. Kavanagh, thought him flawed but "good at the short sprint, the poem expressed in two or three breaths", and a master of first lines, "splendid beginnings". Others might tip the balance the other way, putting before the impressive moments what Mick Imlah once dryly characterized as Gurney's "variable coherence".

As Sean O'Brien notes, Gurney can be "technically at sea"; the phrase that appears in the course of these reflections on the past twelve months of books relating to the war poets. Yet one of those books is an anthology edited by Kendall in which Gurney receives as much space as Graves and Edward Thomas combined. (I mentioned this anthology, Poetry of the First World War, on this blog late last year.) Compare that newfound prominence with one striking symptom of Gurney's marginalization almost half-a-century ago: Roy Fuller, in his role as Oxford Professor of Poetry, could devote a whole lecture to the poetry of the two world wars and not mention Gurney at all.

But since then? Well, in 1985, his name was included in the memorial to the war poets in Westminster Abbey, and in 1995 an Ivor Gurney Society was established to promote interest in both his music and his verse. There have been biographies, collections of letters and much-expanded editions of the poems. In my copy of an anthology from the 1990s, I see that "To His Love" has crept in, amid the many Sassoons and Owens, albeit framed by mini-bouquets of vile poppies. 

Ours is an "absent-minded" culture, Michael Schmidt suggests in his Lives of the Poets, and Gurney is one of those who was, for a time, left behind. But here he is again, in some sense recovered, faults and all – "Men delight to praise men", as he wrote in one of those masterly opening lines.