<<  -- 10 --  Roderic Dunnett    BEHIND THE LINES

If we have Sassoon to thank for beefing up Owen's poetry -- they met and compared notes at Craiglockhart hospital in Edinburgh : Owen's poetry was transformed -- one of the most enabling literary figures after the war was Edmund Blunden [read a biography].

It was Blunden who brought Ivor Gurney's later poetry to a new audience, publishing a first version in 1954 which (like P J Kavanagh's and George Walter's more recently) declined to smooth away the rough, vigorous 'earthiness' of Gurney's craggier post-Whitman, post-Hopkins, incipiently Modernist language, to which the present Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion (amongst others) has rightly drawn attention.

As R K R Thornton, Professor of English at Birmingham, editor of Gurney's Collected Letters and Walter's co-editor on several volumes of his poetry, points out, 'War poetry permits poets to go out on a limb : it fires them off in all directions, like sparklers' (or Verey lights). 'Although Gurney admired and befriended the "Georgian" poets, knew Masefield and was in touch with others like Robert Bridges, he wasn't stuck with having to please a particular audience; nor had he a Sassoon to calm down his extravagances. He began as a fairly conventional poet, but by around 1918 acquired an entirely new voice : after his two successful war collections nobody wanted Gurney's next offerings; and that left him free to charge off and pursue his own line.'

Gurney, whose Ministry of Pensions document -- as Anthony Boden, prime mover of the Ivor Gurney Society and editor of another book of Gurney letters, points out -- indicates he suffered from 'manic depressive pychosis, exacerbated by but not caused by war service', was still writing and (to a degree) composing in Stone House Asylum, Dartford.

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