Gurney set to music many of the poems of his contemporaries, including at least nineteen poems written by Edward Thomas, six of them collected in the orchestral song cycle "Lights Out" published in 1926, and at least seven by W. H. Davies. All of Gurney's settings from the Canadian poet Bliss Carman's "" (1904) were gathered together in a new collection, "Seven Sappho Songs" by Richard Carder in 1998. There is something of Schubert and Schumann, but considerably less of the prevailing folk idiom of the time, in the intensity of Gurney's musical language.