Thom Gunn

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Thom Gunn (29 August 1929 - 25 April 2004) was an Anglo-American poet.

Contents

[edit] Life

He was born Thomson William Gunn in Gravesend, Kent. In his youth, he attended University College School in Hampstead, London. Later, he studied English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduated in 1953, and published his first collection of verse, Fighting Terms, the following year.

In 1954, Gunn emigrated to the United States to teach writing at Stanford University and to remain close to his partner, Mike Kitay, whom he had met while at college. Gunn taught at the University of California at Berkeley from 1958 to 1966 and again from 1973 to 1990.

In 2004 he died in his sleep at his home in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, where he had lived since 1960.

[edit] Career

As a young man, his poetry was associated with The Movement, and later with the work of Ted Hughes. Gunn's poetry, together with that of Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and other members of The Movement, has been described as "...emphasizing purity of diction, and a neutral tone...encouraging a more spare language and a desire to represent a seeing of the world with fresh eyes.".[1][2] During the 1960s and 1970s, his verse grew bolder in its exploration of drugs, homosexuality, and poetic form.

In classic verse forms, like the terza rima of Dante, he explored modern anxieties:

"It is despair that nothing cannot be
Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark
Of dread.
Look upward. Neither firm nor free
Purposeless matter hovers in the dark." ("The Annihilation of Nothing")

Gunn, who praised his Stanford mentor Yvor Winters for keeping "both Rule and Energy in view, / Much power in each, most in the balanced two," found a productive tension – rather than imaginative restriction – in the technical demands of traditional poetic forms. He is one of the few contemporary poets (James Merrill would be another) to write serious poetry in heroic couplets – a form whose use in the twentieth century is generally restricted to light verse and epigrammatic wit. In the 1960s, however, he came to experiment increasingly with free verse, and the discipline of writing to a specific set of visual images, coupled with the liberation of free verse, constituted a new source of rule and energy in Gunn's work: a poem such as "Pierce Street" in his next collection, Touch (1967), has a grainy, photographic fidelity, while the title-poem uses hesitant, sinuous free verse to portray a scene of newly acknowledged intimacy shared with his sleeping lover (and the cat). In Gunn's next book, Jack Straw's Castle (1976), the dream modulates into nightmare, related partly to his actual anxiety-dreams about moving house, and partly to the changing American political climate. "But my life," he wrote, "insists on continuities - between America and England, between free verse and metre, between vision and everyday consciousness."

The Passages Of Joy reaffirmed those continuities: it contains sequences about London in 1964-65 and about time spent in New York in 1970. The Occasions Of Poetry, a selection of his essays and introductions, appeared at the same time. Ten years were to pass before his next collection, The Man With Night Sweats (1992). In 1993, Gunn published a second collection of occasional essays, Shelf Life, and his substantial Collected Poems. His final book of poetry was Boss Cupid (2000).

[edit] Quotation: Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later

I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress.

[edit] Bibliography

  • Fighting Terms, Fantasy Press, Oxford, 1954
  • The Sense of Movement, Faber, London, 1957
  • My Sad Captains and Other Poems, Faber, London, 1961
  • Selected poems by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, Faber, London, 1962
  • Touch 1967
  • Moly 1971
  • Jack Straw's Castle 1976
  • The Passages of Joy 1982
  • The Man With Night Sweats 1992
  • Collected Poems 1993
  • Boss Cupid 2000

[edit] References

  1. ^ Norton Anthology of English Literature
  2. ^ Norton Anthology of English Literature
  • Campbell, J. Thom Gunn in conversation with James Campbell, Between The Lines, London, 2000. ISBN 1-903291-00-3

[edit] External links