author
Ivor Gurney
1890–1937
Remembered as both a poet and a composer, he brought the beauty of the English countryside and the strain of wartime experience into the same vivid body of work. His poems and songs still stand out for their direct feeling, musical language, and deep attachment to place.
2 Audiobooks
Severn & Somme
by Ivor Gurney
War's Embers, and Other Verses
by Ivor Gurney
About the author
Born in Gloucester in 1890, Ivor Gurney showed musical promise early, singing as a chorister at Gloucester Cathedral and later studying at the Royal College of Music. Alongside music, he wrote poetry with a distinctive ear for sound and rhythm, and he went on to become one of the most memorable literary voices shaped by the First World War.
Gurney served in the war and wrote some of his best-known poems out of that experience, often setting the brutality of the front against intense memories of home, countryside, and friendship. He was also an accomplished composer, especially admired for his songs, and his writing in both forms is closely linked by its lyric clarity and emotional honesty.
His life was marked by severe mental illness, and he spent his final years in psychiatric hospitals before his death in 1937. Even so, his reputation has continued to grow, with readers and musicians returning to him as a rare figure whose poetry and music feel equally personal, haunted, and alive.