Gurney, Ivor (Bertie) (1890–1937)

English poet and composer. He was a poet both of the Gloucestershire countryside and of the war at the front. Severn and Somme was published in 1917 and War's Embers in 1919. Though his third volume of verse was rejected, he published song-cycles of poems by A E Housman in 1923 and 1926, and settings of poems of Edward Thomas in 1926.

Gurney was born in Gloucester. At the Royal College of Music in London, to which he won a scholarship in 1911, he began setting Elizabethan lyrics to music. Initially rejected for war service because of his sight, he joined the 2nd/5th Gloucester regiment in 1915, and served in Flanders, where he was gassed. He was discharged from the army on health grounds in 1918. In 1922 he was admitted to the London Mental Hospital, Dartford, where he spent the rest of his life, continuing to write poetry and music.