Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn (1929 - 2004)

GUNN, Thom(son William) (1929–2004), was born in Gravesend and raised principally in Hampstead. His father was a journalist, as his mother had been before her marriage.

In “My Life Up to Now,” an autobiographical essay written in 1977, Gunn warmly recalls growing up in a household full of books and playing with friends on the Heath. However, his parents divorced, and his mother, with whom he lived after the divorce and who encouraged his interest in reading and writing, took her life when he was 15. It is possible that the emphasis, in certain of his poems, on self-definition and self-reliance reflects not only such literary influences as the French existentialists, but also personal circumstances that required independence and resilience of him while he was still relatively young. After two years of national service in the army, Gunn went in 1950 to Cambridge. Here he attended lectures by F. R. Leavis, who impressed him with his passion for literature, his belief in the value of realized imagery, and his insistence on the expressive significance of verse rhythm. Gunn also discovered Donne and read all of Shakespeare, both authors contributing to the formation of his early style, which is exemplified in “Tamer and Hawk” and “The Beach Head,” and which is characterized by a masterful control of the metaphysical conceit, the extended metaphor or analogy. In 1954 he traveled to California, where he held a fellowship at Stanford University and studied for a year with Yvor Winters, about whom he has written a fine reminiscence, “On a Drying Hill.” After living and teaching briefly in Texas, Gunn returned to the San Francisco Bay area, settling in San Francisco itself in 1961.


From 1958 to 1966 he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, but resigned his professorship to devote more time to writing. He subsequently held occasional visiting appointments at different schools; since the late 1970s, he has taught at Berkeley for one term a year. While at Cambridge, Gunn wrote most of the poems that appeared in his first collection, Fighting Terms (1954; revd. edns. 1958, 1962). Impressive for their concentration, their vigour, and their effective fusion of traditional metre with contemporary idiom, these poems established him as one of the most arresting voices of his generation. Though critics associated him with the Movement, his predilections were never as sharply anti-modernist as those of such Movement poets as Larkin and Amis.


Indeed, Gunn soon began to investigate different tonalities, a development encouraged by his move to the United States and by his reading of Williams Carlos Williams, Stevens, and other American experimentalists. Gunn’s second book, The Sense of Movement (1957), and more especially his third, My Sad Captains (1961), feature poems in syllabic measures, poems which, like “Vox Humana” and “Considering the Snail,” show the poet speaking in a quieter, more tentative manner. Gunn has remarked that syllabics provided him with a transitional form to work his way into free verse, and Touch (1967) contains his earliest free-verse poems. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, who began with conventional forms and switched exclusively to free verse, Gunn continued to work in metre too; and Moly (1971), with such memorable poems as “At the Centre” and “Sunlight,” employs strict forms to render illuminations related to experiences with hallucinogenic drugs. Jack Straw’s Castle (1976) in part explores darker aspects of these experiences. The title piece, a sequence of poems examining consciousness nightmarishly isolated from its customary contexts, recalls Gunn’s earlier “Misanthropos” sequence, which appears in Touch and which has as its protagonist a man who has survived a terrible world war and who believes himself to be the only survivor, “the last man” on earth. The Passages of Joy (1982) shows a growing concern with friendship and its social virtues.


Gunn is a homosexual and in the mid- and late 1980s he wrote a number of powerful poems about the AIDS epidemic, collected in The Man with Night Sweats (London, 1992). Overall, Gunn’s poetry has evolved towards a more directly humane treatment of its subjects. This evolution may be seen in the changing aspects of two abiding qualities in his work: his sympathy with the outsider-rebel and his interest in the nature of courage. Whereas the outsider-rebels of earlier poems tend to exhibit, as do the motorcyclists in “On the Move,” romantic self-sufficiency, those in later work are more likely to be injured or lost, as with “Sparrow” or “'Slow Walker.” And if the characteristic gesture of courage in early poems like “Lelia” and “In Santa Maria del Popolo” is that of opening the arms wide to the existential void, in the later work courage is perhaps best expressed by the comforting embrace that the man dying of AIDS in “Memory Unsettled” confers on a friend more sick than he. Gunn has also collaborated with his brother, the photographer Ander Gunn, on Positives (1966), supplying verse to accompany his brother’s photographs. The Occasions of Poetry, Essays in Criticism and Autobiography, (ed. Clive Wilmer (1982; enlarged edn., 1985) displays the wide range of Gunn’s reading and literary sympathies. Key writings on Gunn include the autobiographical essays in The Occasions of Poetry. Jack W. C. Hagstrom and George Bixby’s Thom Gunn, A Bibliography 1940–1978 (London, 1979) offers, as well as data on the poems, a list of interviews with Gunn and entries for his uncollected book-reviews. Three Contemporary Poets: Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes and R. S. Thomas, ed. A. E. Dyson (London, 1990) reprints George Fraser’s fine 1961 essay, “The Poetry of Thom Gunn,” and Wilmer’s illuminating “Definition and Flow: Thom Gunn in the 1970s.” Gregory Woods’s Articulate Flesh (New Haven, Conn., 1987) has a chapter on Gunn as a gay poet. In addition, an issue of PN Review (No. 70, 1989) devoted chiefly to Gunn contains useful discussions of his work. His poems are widely anthologized; the most comprehensive selection of them is his Selected Poems 1950–1975 (London, 1979), winner of the W. H. Smith Award in 1980. from The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-century Poetry in English. Ed. Ian Hamilton. Oxford: Oxford UP. Copyright © Oxford UP. Near the end of his life, Gunn’s poetry increasingly focused on mortality and the constancy of love and physical desire, as witnessed in his final collection, Boss Cupid (London, 2000). Here, for the first time, Gunn confronted in verse the subject of his mother’s suicide: “I am made by her, and undone.” This last collection is considered one of his finest. Gunn died of a heart attack on April 25, 2004. (Poetry Foundation, 2006) POETRY Thom Gunn. Oxford: Fantasy Press, 1953. The Sense of Movement. London: Faber, 1957. My Sad Captains, and Other Poems. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961. Fighting Terms: A Selection, Fantasy Press. Oxford: Faber, 1962. With Ted Hughes. Selected Poems. London: Faber, 1962. A Geography. Iowa City: Stone Wall Press, 1966. Positives, photographs by brother, Ander Gunn. London: Faber, 1966. Touch. London: Faber, 1967. The Garden of the Gods. Cambridge: Pym-Randall Press, 1968. The Explorers. Devon: Richard Gilbertson, Crediton, Devon, 1969. The Fair in the Woods. Oxford: Sycamore Press, 1969. Poems 1950–1966: A Selection. London: Faber, 1969. Sunlight. New York: Albondocani Press, 1969. Last Days at Teddington. London: Poem-of-the-Month Club, 1971. Moly. London: Faber, 1971. With others. Corgi Modern Poets in Focus 5. Edited by Dannie Abse. London: Corgi, 1971. Poem after Chaucer. New York: Albondocani Press, 1971. Moly [and] My Sad Captains. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1973. Mandrakes. London: Rainbow Press, 1973. Songbook. New York: Albondocani Press, 1973. To the Air. Boston: David R. Godine , 1974. Jack Straw’s Castle. New York: F. Hallman, 1975. Jack Straw’s Castle and Other Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1976. The Missed Beat. West Burke: Janus Press, 1976. Games of Chance. Omaha: Abattoir, 1979. Selected Poems 1950–1975. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1979. Bally Power Play. Toronto: Massey Press, 1979. Talbot Road. New York: Helikon Press, 1981. The Menace. San Francisco: ManRoot, 1982. The Passages of Joy. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1982. Lament. Champaign, IL: Doe Press, 1985. Sidewalks. New York: Albondocani Press, 1985. The Hurtless Trees. New York: Jordan Davies, 1986. Night Sweats. Florence: R. L. Barth, 1987. Undesirables. Youngstown: Pig Iron Press, 1988. At the Barriers. New York: NADJA, 1989. Death’s Door. Tuscaloosa, AL: Red Hydra, 1989. The Man with Night Sweats. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1992. Unsought Intimacies: Poems of 1991. Berkeley: Peter Koch, 1993. Collected Poems. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1994. Boss Cupid. London: Faber, 2000. OTHER Editor. Poetry from Cambridge 1951–52: A Selection of Verse by Members of the University. London: Fortune Press, 1953. Editor, with Ted Hughes. Five American Poets. Faber: London, 1963. Editor and author of introduction. Fulke Greville Brooke, Selected Poems of Fulke Greville. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968. Editor. Ben Jonson: Poems. New York: Penguin, 1974. The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography. Edited by Clive Wilmer. New York: Farrar, Straus, 1982. Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs, and an Interview. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1993. Editor. Ezra Pound. London: Faber, 2000.