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Dweller in Shadows - A Life of Ivor Gurney (Hardcover)
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Dweller in Shadows - A Life of Ivor Gurney (Hardcover)
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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and compose, leaving behind a vast body of unpublished work when he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.
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