Anyone growing up in England, at least anyone from my own generation, knows something of the poets of the First World War. Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen all featured in the curriculum when I was a schoolboy. I don’t remember if Ivor Gurney’s work was covered, but I certainly became aware of his poems in my university days and, much later, his music.

Much of Gurney’s life was blighted by mental illness. He first suffered a nervous breakdown while a student at the Royal College of Music, but his condition was much exacerbated by his exposure to the horrors of trench warfare in 1916 and 1917. He fought at Ypres and at the Battle of the Somme, and was shot and gassed. Returning home from the front, he got some support from friends and patrons, but his condition was sufficiently serious for him to seek what proved to be fairly rudimentary treatment in a series of asylums. He died in 1937 in a public asylum in Dartford.

Gurney got some recognition in his lifetime for his poems and songs and was admired by many of his more celebrated peers like Vaughan Williams. Nevertheless, it was only after his death that his work started to be appreciated properly. With Dweller in Shadows, Kate Kennedy might enhance his reputation even further. She has written a compassionate, insightful, and thoughtful account of the life and work of a brilliant and troubled man. My hope is that her biography brings a wider audience to the poetry and music of someone who was at least the equal of his much more famous contemporaries.