Abstract
This chapter demonstrates the force with which Gurney expresses and contemplates personal suffering. Gurney worried that the flaw in his first collection, Severn and Somme (1917), was an excessive focus on ‘Myself’, which lead to ‘thinness, and frailty, and egotism’. The chapter argues that Gurney’s best poetry communicates an intense consciousness of ‘Myself’ which avoids these dangers through the depth and richness of its sense of the self’s pain and singularity.
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Hodgson, A. (2019). Gurney II: ‘A Person Named Myself’. In: The Poetry of Clare, Hopkins, Thomas, and Gurney. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30971-8_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30971-8_10
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Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-30970-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-30971-8
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