Thom Gunn
Encyclopedia
Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004), was an Anglo-American poet who was praised both for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn, who became openly gay, wrote about gay-related topics — particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992 — as well as drug use, sex, and topics related to his bohemian lifestyle. He won numerous major literary awards.
, Kent, the son of Bert Gunn
. Both of his parents were journalists, and they divorced when he was 10 years old. His life was marked by tragedy when, as a teenager, his mother committed suicide. It was she who had sparked in him a love of reading, including an interest in the work of Christopher Marlowe
, John Keats
, John Milton
, and Alfred Tennyson, along with several prose writers. In his youth, he attended University College School
in Hampstead, London, then spent two years in the British national service and six months in Paris. Later, he studied English literature at Trinity College
, Cambridge
, graduated in 1953, and published his first collection of verse, Fighting Terms, the following year. Among several critics who praised the work, John Press wrote, "This is one of the few volumes of postwar verse that all serious readers of poetry need to possess and to study."
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."
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 of acute polysubstance abuse, including methamphetamine
, at his home in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, where he had lived since 1960.
described him as "the last of the commune dwellers [...] serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night". While he continued to sharpen his use of the metrical forms that characterized his early career, he became more and more interested in syllabics
and free verse
. "He’s possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain
while on LSD
, and he’s certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both [Yvor] Winters
(the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch ... well, Allen Ginsberg
)", critic Daniel Orr has written. "This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd background."
In classic verse forms, like the terza rima
of Dante
, he explored modern anxieties:
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).
The poet's major stylistic change in his shift toward free verse roughly within a decade that included much of the 1960s, combined with the other changes in his life — his move from England to America, from academic Cambridge to bohemian San Francisco, his becoming openly gay, his drug-taking, his writing about the "urban underbelly" — caused many to conjecture how his lifestyle was affecting his work "British reviewers who opposed Gunn’s technical shifts blamed California, just as American critics would, later on, connect his adventurous lifestyle with his more 'relaxed' versification," according to Orr, who added that even as of 2009, critics were contrasting "Gunn’s libido with his tight metrics — as if no one had ever written quatrains about having sex before".
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 and most famous collection, The Man With Night Sweats (1992), dominated by AIDS-related elegies. Neil Powell praised the book: "Gunn restores poetry to a centrality it has often seemed close to losing, by dealing in the context of a specific human catastrophe with the great themes of life and death, coherently, intelligently, memorably. One could hardly ask for more." As a result of the book, Gunn received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1993. Although AIDS was a focus of much of his later work, he remained HIV-negative himself.
That year, Gunn published a second collection of occasional essays, Shelf Life, and his substantial Collected Poems. His final book of poetry was Boss Cupid (2000).
In 2003 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize
for Literature together with Beryl Bainbridge
. He also received the Levinson Prize, an Arts Council of Great Britain Award, a Rockefeller Award, the W. H. Smith Award, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the Forward Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
Five years after his death, a new edition of Gunn's Selected Poems was published, edited by August Kleinzahler
.
Life and career
Gunn was born in GravesendGravesend, Kent
Gravesend is a town in northwest Kent, England, on the south bank of the Thames, opposite Tilbury in Essex. It is the administrative town of the Borough of Gravesham and, because of its geographical position, has always had an important role to play in the history and communications of this part of...
, Kent, the son of Bert Gunn
Bert Gunn
Herbert Smith "Bert" Gunn was a British newspaper editor.Born in Gravesend, Gunn worked as a reporter for the Kent Messenger, and then the Straits Times in Singapore. He returned to the UK to work at the Manchester Evening News, then the London Evening News and the Evening Standard...
. Both of his parents were journalists, and they divorced when he was 10 years old. His life was marked by tragedy when, as a teenager, his mother committed suicide. It was she who had sparked in him a love of reading, including an interest in the work of Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe
Christopher Marlowe was an English dramatist, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. As the foremost Elizabethan tragedian, next to William Shakespeare, he is known for his blank verse, his overreaching protagonists, and his mysterious death.A warrant was issued for Marlowe's arrest on 18 May...
, John Keats
John Keats
John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...
, John Milton
John Milton
John Milton was an English poet, polemicist, a scholarly man of letters, and a civil servant for the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell...
, and Alfred Tennyson, along with several prose writers. In his youth, he attended University College School
University College School
University College School, generally known as UCS, is an Independent school charity situated in Hampstead, north west London, England. The school was founded in 1830 by University College London and inherited many of that institution's progressive and secular views...
in Hampstead, London, then spent two years in the British national service and six months in Paris. Later, he studied English literature at Trinity College
Trinity College, Cambridge
Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Trinity has more members than any other college in Cambridge or Oxford, with around 700 undergraduates, 430 graduates, and over 170 Fellows...
, Cambridge
Cambridge
The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...
, graduated in 1953, and published his first collection of verse, Fighting Terms, the following year. Among several critics who praised the work, John Press wrote, "This is one of the few volumes of postwar verse that all serious readers of poetry need to possess and to study."
As a young man, his poetry was associated with The Movement, and later with the work of Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
Edward James Hughes OM , more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until...
. Gunn's poetry, together with that of Philip Larkin
Philip Larkin
Philip Arthur Larkin, CH, CBE, FRSL is widely regarded as one of the great English poets of the latter half of the twentieth century...
, Donald Davie
Donald Davie
Donald Alfred Davie was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes.-Biography:...
, 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."
In 1954, Gunn emigrated to the United States to teach writing at Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...
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 of acute polysubstance abuse, including methamphetamine
Methamphetamine
Methamphetamine is a psychostimulant of the phenethylamine and amphetamine class of psychoactive drugs...
, at his home in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood in San Francisco, where he had lived since 1960.
Work
During the 1960s and 1970s, his verse became increasingly bold in its exploration of drugs, homosexuality, and poetic form. He enjoyed the bohemian lifestyle in San Francisco so much that Edmund WhiteEdmund White
Edmund Valentine White III is an American author and literary critic. He is a member of the faculty of Princeton University's Program in Creative Writing.- Life and work :...
described him as "the last of the commune dwellers [...] serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night". While he continued to sharpen his use of the metrical forms that characterized his early career, he became more and more interested in syllabics
Syllabics
Syllabics may refer to:* Canadian Aboriginal syllabics, a writing system for Inuit and Cree* Abugida, a writing system in which consonant graphemes are inherently associated with a default vowel...
and free verse
Free verse
Free verse is a form of poetry that refrains from consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any other musical pattern.Poets have explained that free verse, despite its freedom, is not free. Free Verse displays some elements of form...
. "He’s possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain
Quintain
Quintain may refer to:* Quintain , a jousting game* Quintain Estates and Development, a property company* Quintaine Americana, a rock band...
while on LSD
LSD
Lysergic acid diethylamide, abbreviated LSD or LSD-25, also known as lysergide and colloquially as acid, is a semisynthetic psychedelic drug of the ergoline family, well known for its psychological effects which can include altered thinking processes, closed and open eye visuals, synaesthesia, an...
, and he’s certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both [Yvor] Winters
Yvor Winters
Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic.-As modernist:Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American...
(the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch ... well, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
)", critic Daniel Orr has written. "This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd background."
In classic verse forms, like the terza rima
Terza rima
Terza rima is a rhyming verse stanza form that consists of an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme. It was first used by the Italian poet Dante Alighieri.-Form:Terza rima is a three-line stanza using chain rhyme in the pattern A-B-A, B-C-B, C-D-C, D-E-D...
of Dante
Dante Alighieri
Durante degli Alighieri, mononymously referred to as Dante , was an Italian poet, prose writer, literary theorist, moral philosopher, and political thinker. He is best known for the monumental epic poem La commedia, later named La divina commedia ...
, 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
Yvor Winters
Arthur Yvor Winters was an American poet and literary critic.-As modernist:Winters's early poetry, which appeared in small avant-garde magazines alongside work by writers like James Joyce and Gertrude Stein, was written in the modernist idiom, and was heavily influenced both by Native American...
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
James Merrill
James Ingram Merrill was an American poet whose awards include the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Divine Comedies...
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).
The poet's major stylistic change in his shift toward free verse roughly within a decade that included much of the 1960s, combined with the other changes in his life — his move from England to America, from academic Cambridge to bohemian San Francisco, his becoming openly gay, his drug-taking, his writing about the "urban underbelly" — caused many to conjecture how his lifestyle was affecting his work "British reviewers who opposed Gunn’s technical shifts blamed California, just as American critics would, later on, connect his adventurous lifestyle with his more 'relaxed' versification," according to Orr, who added that even as of 2009, critics were contrasting "Gunn’s libido with his tight metrics — as if no one had ever written quatrains about having sex before".
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 and most famous collection, The Man With Night Sweats (1992), dominated by AIDS-related elegies. Neil Powell praised the book: "Gunn restores poetry to a centrality it has often seemed close to losing, by dealing in the context of a specific human catastrophe with the great themes of life and death, coherently, intelligently, memorably. One could hardly ask for more." As a result of the book, Gunn received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1993. Although AIDS was a focus of much of his later work, he remained HIV-negative himself.
That year, Gunn published a second collection of occasional essays, Shelf Life, and his substantial Collected Poems. His final book of poetry was Boss Cupid (2000).
In 2003 he was awarded the David Cohen Prize
David Cohen Prize
The David Cohen Prize for Literature is a biennial British literary award given to a writer, novelist, short-story writer, poet, essayist or dramatist in recognition of an entire body of work, written in the English language. The prize is funded by the John S. Cohen Foundation and administered by...
for Literature together with Beryl Bainbridge
Beryl Bainbridge
Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge, DBE was an English author from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her psychological novels, often set amongst the English working classes. Bainbridge won the Whitbread Awards prize for best novel in 1977 and 1996; she was nominated five times for the Booker...
. He also received the Levinson Prize, an Arts Council of Great Britain Award, a Rockefeller Award, the W. H. Smith Award, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the Forward Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
Five years after his death, a new edition of Gunn's Selected Poems was published, edited by August Kleinzahler
August Kleinzahler
-Life and career:Until he was 11, he went to school in Fort Lee, New Jersey, where he grew up. He then commuted to the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, graduating in 1967. He wrote poetry from this time, inspired by Keats and Kenneth Rexroth translations, among other works...
.
Further reading
- Campbell, J. Thom Gunn in conversation with James Campbell, Between The Lines, London, 2000. ISBN 1-903291-00-3
- Thom Gunn, Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview (Poets on Poetry) 1993
External links
- Profile and poems written and audio at the Poetry Archive
- Profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation
- Obituary of Thom Gunn U.S. Poet Laureate (Robert PinskyRobert PinskyRobert Pinsky is an American poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator. From 1997 to 2000, he served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. Pinsky is the author of nineteen books, most of which are collections of his own poetry...
) - Obituary of Thom Gunn (Daily Telegraph)
- Obituary of Thom Gunn, San Francisco Chronicle. "A Poet's Life, Part One", "A Poet's Life Part Two"
- Study Guide to Gunn's poetry
- Poets.org: Profile and poems
- Guide to the Thom Gunn archive at The Bancroft Library