Ivor Gurney: Embracing and Attacking A. E. Housman

Ivor Gurney, probably the only composer since Thomas Campion to be as gifted a poet as he was a musician, used, in his 1919 song cycle Ludlow and Teme, a complex and conflicted engagement with poems from A. E. Housman’s A Shropshire Lad to express his deeply ambivalent relationship to the war he had just survived. His settings in Ludlow and Teme are compared with Butterworth’s Housman settings, written in 1911 and 1912, and with Gurney’s own war poetry. While Gurney does harness Housman’s cultural associations with the pastoral, England and nationhood, his musical treatment of the texts translates the sentiments of a war poet into music.