Abstract
Look for Ivor Gurney in The New Oxford Book of English Verse and you will be disappointed. Look for him in Larkin’s Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse and you will find only this:
Strange Hells
There are strange Hells within the minds War made Not so often, not so humiliatingly afraid As one would have expected — the racket and fear guns made. One Hell the Gloucester soldiers they quite put out; Their first bombardment, when in combined black shout Of fury, guns aligned, they ducked lower their heads And sang with diaphragms fixed beyond all dreads, That tin and stretched-wire tinkle, that blither of tune; ‘Après la guerre fini’ till Hell all had come down, Twelve-inch, six-inch, and eighteen pounders hammering Hell’s thunders.
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Notes
F. R. Leavis, ‘Auden, Bottrall and Others’, Scrutiny vol. III, no. 1 (June 1934) p. 72.
D. W. Harding, ‘The Solid Virtues’ (A review of Claudius The God by Robert Graves), Scrutiny, vol. III, no. 4 (March 1935) p. 422.
D. W. Harding; ‘Aspects of the Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg’, Scrutiny, vol. III, no. 4 (March 1935) p. 358.
Walt Whitman, ‘As I Lay with my Head in Your Lap Camerado’, The Complete Poems (Penguin Education, 1975) p. 346.
T. S. Eliot, ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, Selected Essays (London, 1951) p. 17.
Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War (London, 1928; reissued Penguin Books, 1982) pp. 66–7.
Wilfred Mellers, ‘Ivor Gurney and the English Art-Song’, Scrutiny, vol. VII, no. 3 (December, 1938) p. 333.
Helen Thomas, Time and Again: memoirs and letters (Manchester, 1978) pp. 110–12.
Edmund Blunden, ‘Concerning Ivor Gurney’, Poems By Ivor Gurney (London, 1954) p. 10.
Edward Thomas, ‘England’, A language not to be betrayed: Selected prose of Edward Thomas (Manchester. 1981) pp. 229–30.
Ivor Gurney, ‘Roads — Those Roads’, Collected Poems of Ivor Gurney (Oxford, 1982) p. 140.
Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (London, 1937; reprinted London, 1972) pp. 289–90.
Frank Richards, Old Soldiers Never Die (London, 1933) p. 227.
See Tony Ashworth, Trench Warfare, 1914–1918: The Live and Let Live System (London, 1980) pp. 21–22 and passim.
Frederick Manning, Her Privates We (London, 1929; reissued as The Middle Parts of Fortune, London, 1977) pp. 216–17. Trevor Wilson, The Myriad Faces of War: Britain and the Great War, 1914–1918 (Cambridge, 1986) pp. 678–84, writes about this passage: I am indebted to his discussion.
Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Sick Leave’, The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon (London, 1983) p. 94.
Ivor Gurney, War Letters (Manchester, 1983) pp. 127–28. ‘Pain’, Collected Poems, p. 36 is the version quoted here.
Rupert Brooke, ‘The Dead’, The Collected Poems (London, 1942) p. 148.
Geoffrey Hill, ‘Gurney’s Hobby’, Essays in Criticism vol. XXXIV, no. 2 (April 1984) suggests, however, ‘the push of the denunciation is toward a crying-out at God’, p. 116.
Leon Wolff, In Flanders Fields; The 1917 Campaign (Penguin Books, 1987) pp. 48–9.
Quoted in Eric Leed No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (Cambridge, 1979) p. 126.
William Carlos Williams, The Collected Earlier Poems of William Carlos Williams (London, 1951) p. 241.
O.E.D. (Second Edition) cites Kipling, The New Army in Training, 1915, Ch.11, p. 10 ‘and the squads at bayonet-practice, had their balance, drive, and recover already.’
William Wordsworth, ‘Resolution and Independence’, Poetical Works (Oxford, 1950) p. 156.
See Anthony Boden, Stars In A Dark Night, The Letters of Ivor Gurney to the Chapman Family (London, 1986) p. 107.
Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That (London, 1929; reissued Penguin Books, 1960) pp. 68–71.
Quoted in Anthony Babington, For the Sake of Example: Capital Courts Martial 1914–20 (London, 1985) p. 7.
W. B. Yeats, ‘Vacillation’, The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats (London, 1950) p. 283.
J. W. Lambert, ‘Introduction’ to The Bodley Head Saki (London, 1963) p. 55.
Philip Warner, Passchendaele: The Story Behind the Tragic Victory of 1917 (London, 1987) p. 1.
Quoted in Lyn Macdonald, They Called it Passchendaele: The Story of the Third Battle of Ypres and the Men Who Fought in It (London, 1983) pp. 186–7.
Michael Hurd, The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (Oxford, 1984) p. 101.
Edwin Campion Vaughan, Some Desperate Glory: The diary of a young officer, 1917 (London, 1985) p. 199.
Dante, The Inferno of Dante Alighieri, The Temple Classics (London; 1900 reset 1932) pp. 358–9.
Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford, 1977) pp. 182–6.
L. F. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud; Chemical Warfare in the First World War (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986) p. 192.
Wilfred Owen, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (London, 1963) p. 55.
F. L. Haber, The Poisonous Cloud, p. 104. Compare Richard Aldington’s account of a phosgene attack in Death Of A Hero (London, 1929; reissued 1984) pp. 307–15.
Ibid., pp. 257–8. But see W. H. Trethowan, ‘Ivor Gurney’s Mental Illness’, Music and Letters, vol. 62: 3–4 (July–October 1981), p. 302: ‘He remained [at Dartford] until his death from tuberculosis, a common fate of patients with schizophrenia in the days before modern treatment.’
J. M. Winter, The Great War and the British People (London, 1986) p. 291.
C. E. Montague, Disenchantment (London, 1922; reprinted 1924) p. 201.
See Arthur Marwick, The Deluge: British Society and the First World War (London, 1978) p. 283.
Jon Silkin, Out of Battle; The Poetry of the Great War (Oxford, 1972) p. 125.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The Windhover’, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Oxford, 1967) p. 69.
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Pagett, M. P.’, Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, Inclusive Edition, 1885–1932 (London, 1933) p. 26.
Iona and Peter Opie, The Lore and Language of School Children (Oxford, Clarendon Press. 1959) p. 283.
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© 1991 Piers Gray
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Gray, P. (1991). Toad Eating: Ivor Gurney. In: Marginal Men. Language, Discourse, Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08137-0_3
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