Download or read book The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney written by Michael Hurd and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2011-11-17 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: First published in 1978 The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney is a moving and extraordinary account of a tragic genius penned by the composer Michael Hurd. Born in Gloucester in 1890 Ivor Gurney began writing songs and poems in his teens, taking his inspiration from the Severn Valley countryside where he grew up. Sent to the Western Front during the First World War Gurney experienced desolation and horror that made a profound impression on him. He ended his days in an asylum, but at his death in 1937 he was beginning to be acknowledged as one of England's finest composers. Still, it took several more decades for his work as a war poet to be fully appreciated. 'Hurd compresses into a taut, sympathetic outline the initial optimism and later torment of Gurney's ill-starred life... distinguished by its crisp use of poetic extracts.' PN Review
Download or read book Dweller in Shadows written by Kate Kennedy and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-13 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Originally a student of music, [Gurney] took up poetry in the trenches of the First World War, and was working on what would be his first volume of verse when, in 1917, he suffered wounds to the shoulder; and it was just before publication of this volume, Severn & Somme, that he was gassed at Passchendaele. After his return to Britain he resumed his musical studies, ... and quickly found outlets for his compositions. There is some debate about whether or not his subsequent mental illness was a consequence of the horrors and sufferings of the war; but mental illness marked the rest of his life, and indeed from about 1922 until his death he was institutionalised ... He nevertheless continued to produce poems and musical compositions in prolific fashion, and his works in both areas are read and performed, respectively, to this day"--
Download or read book Ivor Gurney written by John Lucas and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on biographical information, letters, reminiscences and anecdotes, John Lucas pieces together the troubled life of Ivor Gurney, a key 20th century poet.
Download or read book Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War written by Peter Barham and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2007-01-01 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a poignant, sometimes ribald, history of the rank-and-file servicemen who were psychiatric casualties of World War One.
Download or read book Best Poems written by Ivor Gurney and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best Poems consists of fair copies Gurney made, with few alterations. The Book of Five Makings is more a working draft, with recastings of the same poems, revealing the process by which he brought his art to completion. Of the 116 poems in this double volume, fewer than a quarter are previously collected. In his introduction R.K.R. Thornton, Professor of English at the University of Birmingham and editor of Gurney's poems and collected letters, sets the books in context. Annotations give readers a clear picture of the books as Gurney wanted them to be.
Download or read book A Shropshire Lad written by Alfred Edward Housman and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Routledge History of Literature in English written by Ronald Carter and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2001 with total page 598 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a guide to the main developments in the history of British and Irish literature, charting some of the main features of literary language development and highlighting key language topics.
Download or read book The Poetry of Shell Shock written by Daniel Hipp and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2005-07-28 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The British poets Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney, and Siegfried Sassoon found themselves psychologically altered by what they experienced in the First World War. Owen was hospitalized in April 1917 for "shell shock" in Scotland, where he met Siegfried Sassoon in June of that year, hospitalized for the same affliction. Ivor Gurney found the war, ironically, to have been a place of relative stability within an otherwise tormented life; When he was wounded during the war's final year, his doctors observed signs of mental illness, which evolved into incapacitating psychosis by 1922. For each of these men--all poets before the war--poetry served as a way to inscribe continuity into their lives, enabling them to retaliate against the war's propensity to render the lives of the participants discontinuous. Poetry allowed them to return to the war through memory and imagination, and poetry helped them to bring themselves back from psychological breakdown to a state of stability, based upon a relationship to the war that their literary war enabled them to create and discover. This work investigates the ways in which the poetry of war functioned as a means for these three men to express the inexpressible and to extract value out of the experience of war. Bibliography and index are also included. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
Download or read book Marginal Men written by Piers Gray and published by Springer. This book was released on 1991-06-18 with total page 199 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Sonnet written by Stephen Regan and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2019-02-28 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sonnet provides a comprehensive study of one of the oldest and most popular forms of poetry, widely used by Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, and still used centuries later by poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, and Carol Ann Duffy. This book traces the development of the sonnet from its origins in medieval Italy to its widespread acceptance in modern Britain, Ireland, and America. It shows how the sonnet emerges from the aristocratic courtly centres of Renaissance Europe and gradually becomes the chosen form of radical political poets such as Milton. The book draws on detailed critical analysis of some of the best-known sonnets written in English to explain how the sonnet functions as a poetic form, and it argues that the flexibility and versatility of the sonnet have given it a special place in literary history and tradition.
Download or read book Ivor Gurney Marion Scott written by Pamela Blevins and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2008 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Insightful account of the life and works of two of the most important figures in twentieth-century British cultural life.
Download or read book Dweller in Shadows written by Kate Kennedy and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Poetry of Clare Hopkins Thomas and Gurney written by Andrew Hodgson and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 345 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book attends to four poets – John Clare, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Edward Thomas, and Ivor Gurney – whose poems are remarkable for their personal directness and distinctiveness. It shows how their writing conveys a potently individual quality of feeling, perception, and experience: each poet responds with unusual commitment to the Romantic idea of art as personal expression. The book looks closely at the vitality and intricacy of the poets’ language, the personal candour of their subject matter, and their sense, obdurate but persuasive, of their own strangeness. As it traces the tact and imagination with which each of the four writers realises the possibilities of individualism in lyric, it affirms the vibrancy of their contributions to nineteenth and twentieth-century poetry.
Download or read book The Fire that Breaks written by Daniel Westover and published by Liverpool University Press. This book was released on 2020-02-27 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Fire that Breaks brings together an international team of scholars to explore for the first time Hopkins’s extended influence on the poets and novelists who have defined modern and contemporary Anglo-American literature since the advent of the twentieth century.
Download or read book A war of individuals written by Jonathan Atkin and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-19 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. This book draws together for the very first time examples of the 'aesthetic pacifism' practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. In addition, the book outlines the stories of those less well-known who shared the mind-set of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first 'total war'. The research for this study took five years, gathering evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad. This is the first time that such wide-ranging evidence has been placed together in order to paint a complete picture of this fascinating form of anti-war expression.
Download or read book Night Falls Fast written by Kay Redfield Jamison and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2000-10-10 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Critical reading for parents, educators, and anyone wanting to understand the tragic epidemic of suicide—”a powerful book [that] will change people's lives—and, doubtless, save a few" (Newsday). The first major book in a quarter century on suicide—and its terrible pull on the young in particular—Night Falls Fast is tragically timely: suicide has become one of the most common killers of Americans between the ages of fifteen and forty-five. From the author of the best-selling memoir, An Unquiet Mind—and an internationally acknowledged authority on depression—Dr. Jamison has also known suicide firsthand: after years of struggling with manic-depression, she tried at age twenty-eight to kill herself. Weaving together a historical and scientific exploration of the subject with personal essays on individual suicides, she brings not only her remarkable compassion and literary skill but also all of her knowledge and research to bear on this devastating problem. This is a book that helps us to understand the suicidal mind, to recognize and come to the aid of those at risk, and to comprehend the profound effects on those left behind.
Download or read book British Culture and the First World War written by Toby Thacker and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2014-09-25 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The First World War has been mythologized since 1918, and many paradigmatic views of it - that it was pointless, that brave soldiers were needlessly sacrificed - are deeply embedded in the British consciousness. More than in any other country, these collective British memories were influenced by the experiences and the work of writers, painters and musicians. This book revisits the British experience of the War through the eyes and ears of a diverse group of carefully selected novelists, poets, composers and painters. It examines how they reacted to and portrayed their experiences in the trenches on the Western Front, in distant theatres of war and on the home front, in words, pictures and music that would have a profound influence on subsequent British perceptions of the war. Rupert Brooke, Vera Brittain, Richard Nevinson, Paul Nash, Edward Elgar and T. E. Lawrence are amongst the figures discussed in this original exploration of the First World War and British collective memory. The book includes illustrations and maps to aid further study and research.
