While in the past ten years Ivor Gurney has increasingly been taken seriously by anthologists and students of World War One poetry, that seriousness is compromised by the tendency too readily (because of superficial similarities) to group Gurney with Edmund Blunden and to classify both as poets of 'pastoral retreat', as therefore less important than the less traditional and more 'realistic', 'ironic', and hence 'modern' poets, such as Sassoon and Owen. Bernard Bergonzi in Heroes' Twilight (1965), one of the first book-length studies of the literature of the First World War, set the terms for subsequent treatments: he refined the conventional division of English war poetry into an early, pro-war, patriotic period and a later, anti-war, protest period (from 1916 to Armistice) by subdividing this second period, detecting two different responses to the realities of the post-Somme phase - the traditionalists who 'evaded' the conditions of the Front by recalling images of rural England (such as Blunden and Gurney), and the deliberate, uncompromising realists. Like most recent critics, such as Jon Silkin and Paul Fussell, he promotes this last group because they mark the culmination of the gradual deflation since the Renaissance of the heroic ideal. (It is, Bergonzi claims, setting aside Prince Hal, the triumph of Falstaff over Hotspur; cowardice is a 'biological virtue'.) Anti-war poetry is for these critics almost necessarily more sincere and truthful. These agreeable bifurcations, groupings, and preferences support some rather over-simplified ethical as well as literary views. By re-examining Blunden and Gurney I ...