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Thomson William "Thom" Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004) was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his later poetry in America, even after moving towards a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn 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 his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards; his best poems were said to have a compact philosophical elegance.


Life and career

Gunn was born in
Gravesend, Kent Gravesend is a town in northwest Kent, England, situated 21 miles (35 km) east-southeast of Charing Cross (central London) on the south bank of the River Thames and opposite Tilbury in Essex. Located in the diocese of Rochester, it is th ...
, England, the son of
Bert Gunn Herbert Smith Gunn (3 April 1903 – 2 March 1962) was a British newspaper editor. Biography Born in Gravesend, Bert Gunn worked as a reporter for the '' Kent Messenger'', and then the ''Straits Times'' in Singapore. He returned to the U ...
. Both of his parents were journalists. They divorced when he was 10 years old. When he was a teenager his mother killed herself. It was she who had sparked in him a love of reading, including an interest in the work of
Christopher Marlowe Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (; baptised 26 February 156430 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe is among the most famous of the Elizabethan playwrights. Based upon t ...
,
John Keats John Keats (31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821) was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculos ...
,
John Milton John Milton (9 December 1608 – 8 November 1674) was an English poet and intellectual. His 1667 epic poem ''Paradise Lost'', written in blank verse and including over ten chapters, was written in a time of immense religious flux and politica ...
, and
Alfred, Lord Tennyson Alfred Tennyson, 1st Baron Tennyson (6 August 1809 – 6 October 1892) was an English poet. He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his ...
, along with several prose writers. In his youth, he attended
University College School ("Slowly but surely") , established = , closed = , type = Public schoolIndependent day school , religion = , president = , head_label = Headmaster , head = Mark Beard , r_head_label = , r_he ...
in Hampstead, London, then spent two years doing
national service National service is the system of voluntary government service, usually military service. Conscription is mandatory national service. The term ''national service'' comes from the United Kingdom's National Service (Armed Forces) Act 1939. The ...
and six months in Paris. Later, he studied English literature at
Trinity College, Cambridge Trinity College is a constituent college of the University of Cambridge. Founded in 1546 by King Henry VIII, Trinity is one of the largest Cambridge colleges, with the largest financial endowment of any college at either Cambridge or Oxford. ...
, graduating in 1953, having achieved a first in Part I of the
Tripos At the University of Cambridge, a Tripos (, plural 'Triposes') is any of the examinations that qualify an undergraduate for a bachelor's degree or the courses taken by a student to prepare for these. For example, an undergraduate studying mat ...
and a second in Part II. ''Fighting Terms'', his first collection of verse, was published 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."Web page title
"Thom Gunn" at the website of the Academy of American Poets
retrieved 12 July 2009
As a young man, he wrote poetry associated with The Movement and, later, with the work of
Ted Hughes Edward James "Ted" Hughes (17 August 1930 – 28 October 1998) was an English poet, translator, and children's writer. Critics frequently rank him as one of the best poets of his generation and one of the twentieth century's greatest wri ...
. Gunn's poetry, together with that of
Philip Larkin Philip Arthur Larkin (9 August 1922 – 2 December 1985) was an English poet, novelist, and librarian. His first book of poetry, ''The North Ship'', was published in 1945, followed by two novels, ''Jill'' (1946) and ''A Girl in Winter'' (1947 ...
,
Donald Davie Donald Alfred Davie, FBA (17 July 1922 – 18 September 1995) was an English Movement poet, and literary critic. His poems in general are philosophical and abstract, but often evoke various landscapes. Biography Davie was born in Barnsley, ...
, 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, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. Stanford is conside ...
and to remain close to his partner, Mike Kitay, whom he had met while at college. Gunn and Kitay continued to reside together until Gunn's death. While at Stanford he taught a class called "The Occasions of Poetry". Gunn taught at the
University of California at Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public university, public land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of Californi ...
from 1958 to 1966 and again from 1973 to 2000. He was "an early fan" of the radical gay sex documentary
zine A zine ( ; short for '' magazine'' or '' fanzine'') is a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images, usually reproduced via a copy machine. Zines are the product of either a single person or of a very s ...
'' Straight to Hell''. In April 2004, he died of acute polysubstance abuse, including
methamphetamine Methamphetamine (contracted from ) is a potent central nervous system (CNS) stimulant that is mainly used as a recreational drug and less commonly as a second-line treatment for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder and obesity. Methamp ...
, at his home in the
Haight Ashbury Haight-Ashbury () is a district of San Francisco, California, named for the intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets. It is also called The Haight and The Upper Haight. The neighborhood is known as one of the main centers of the counterculture ...
neighbourhood in San Francisco, where he had lived since 1960.


Work

In 2014, Owen Boynton, an English teacher, compared and contrasted the first line of
Geoffrey Hill Sir Geoffrey William Hill, FRSL (18 June 1932 – 30 June 2016) was an English poet, professor emeritus of English literature and religion, and former co-director of the Editorial Institute, at Boston University. Hill has been considered to be ...
's "The Turtle Dove" and that of Gunn's early poem "Tamer and Hawk". Hill, through a collision of "love" and another word which ends the formal rhetoric, uncovers the "sinews of the English language" (like
Dryden '' John Dryden (; – ) was an English poet, literary critic, translator, and playwright who in 1668 was appointed England's first Poet Laureate. He is seen as dominating the literary life of Restoration England to such a point that the per ...
,
Jonson Jonson is a surname, and may refer to: * Ben Jonson Benjamin "Ben" Jonson (c. 11 June 1572 – c. 16 August 1637) was an English playwright and poet. Jonson's artistry exerted a lasting influence upon English poetry and stage comedy. He popu ...
, and Pound). Gunn, whose poem is about the speaker’s mind giving way to his body’s actions, goes further: the importance of a certain shift (from "thought" to a simple word) in the overall poem shows the sinew of English to "
erve Erve (locally ) is a '' comune'' (municipality) in the Province of Lecco in the Italian region Lombardy, located about northeast of Milan and about southeast of Lecco. As of 31 December 2004, it had a population of 758 and an area of .All demogra ...
the muscle of his mind", also. During the 1960s and 1970s, Gunn's verse became increasingly bold in its exploration of drug taking, homosexuality, and poetic form. He enjoyed the bohemian lifestyle in San Francisco so much that Edmund White 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 characterised his early career, he became more and more interested in syllabics and
free verse Free verse is an open form of poetry, which in its modern form arose through the French '' vers libre'' form. It does not use consistent meter patterns, rhyme, or any musical pattern. It thus tends to follow the rhythm of natural speech. Defi ...
. "He's possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent quintain while on
LSD Lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD), also known colloquially as acid, is a potent psychedelic drug. Effects typically include intensified thoughts, emotions, and sensory perception. At sufficiently high dosages LSD manifests primarily mental, vi ...
, and he's certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both
vor VOR or vor may refer to: Organizations * Vale of Rheidol Railway in Wales * Voice of Russia, a radio broadcaster * Volvo Ocean Race, a yacht race Science, technology and medicine * VHF omnidirectional range, a radio navigation aid used in ...
Winters (the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch ... well,
Allen Ginsberg Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Gener ...
)", critic David Orr has written. "This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd background."Orr, David, "On Poetry" column
"Too Close to Touch"
''New York Times Book Review'', 12 July 2009 (published 9 July online), retrieved 12 July 2009
In classic verse forms, like the
terza rima ''Terza rima'' (, also , ; ) is a rhyming verse form, in which the poem, or each poem-section, consists of tercets (three line stanzas) with an interlocking three-line rhyme scheme: The last word of the second line in one tercet provides the rh ...
of
Dante Dante Alighieri (; – 14 September 1321), probably baptized Durante di Alighiero degli Alighieri and often referred to as Dante (, ), was an Italian poet, writer and philosopher. His ''Divine Comedy'', originally called (modern Italian: ' ...
, he explored modern anxieties: Gunn, who praised his
Stanford Stanford University, officially Leland Stanford Junior University, is a Private university, private research university in Stanford, California. The campus occupies , among the largest in the United States, and enrolls over 17,000 students. S ...
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 heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the ''Legend of ...
– 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 towards 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 Johannes Daniel "Neil" Powell (born 28 June 1978) is a former South African Rugby Union player and currently the Director of Rugby of the Sharks (rugby union), Sharks. He is the former Head Coach of the South Africa national rugby sevens team, ...
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 The Academy of American Poets is a national, member-supported organization that promotes poets and the art of poetry. The nonprofit organization was incorporated in the state of New York in 1934. It fosters the readership of poetry through outreac ...
in 1993. Although AIDS was a focus of much of his later work, he remained HIV-negative himself.Biespiel, David
"A Poet's Life Part Two"
''San Francisco Chronicle'', 26 April 2005, retrieved 17 July 2009
That year, Gunn published a second collection of essays with an interview, ''Shelf Life'', and his substantial'' Collected Poems'', which David Biespiel hailed as a highlight of the century's poetry: "Thom Gunn is a poet of 'comradely love'. Compassion has always been his domain and his work's principal emotion. If 20th century verse written in English can be seen as a battle between memory and voice – between the phenomena and its history, on the one hand, and the poet's conviction and feeling about it, on the other – then Gunn's importance lies in the accuracy with which he unifies the language and emotion of experience. You're not sure where one ends and the other starts. The result is that his poems find the limits of their imaginative territory and then push beyond that." His final book of poetry was ''Boss Cupid'' (2000). In 2003 he was awarded the
David Cohen Prize The David Cohen Prize for Literature (est. 1993) is a 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 funde ...
for Literature together with
Beryl Bainbridge Dame Beryl Margaret Bainbridge (21 November 1932 – 2 July 2010) was an English writer from Liverpool. She was primarily known for her works of psychological fiction, often macabre tales set among the English working class. Bainbridge won the ...
. 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. He won Publishing Triangle's inaugural Triangle Award for Gay Poetry in 2001 for ''Boss Cupid''; following his death, the award was renamed the Thom Gunn Award in his memory.


Legacy

Five years after his death, a new edition of Gunn's ''Selected Poems'' was published, edited by
August Kleinzahler August Kleinzahler (born December 10, 1949) is an American poet. 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 p ...
. Gunn was honored in 2017 along with other notables, named on bronze bootprints, as part of
San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley The San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley consists of four works of art along the Ringold Street alley, at 8th Street, in San Francisco's SOMA district honoring leather culture; it opened in 2017. Artworks Collectively titled ''Le ...
. In 2020
Jack Fritscher John Joseph "Jack" Fritscher (born June 20, 1939) is an American author, university professor, historian, and social activist known internationally for his fiction, erotica and non-fiction analyses of popular culture and gay male culture. A pre- ...
received the
National Leather Association International National Leather Association International (NLA-I) is a BDSM organization, based in the United States with chapters in various cities in the United States and Canada. It was founded in 1986 as the "National Leather Association" (NLA), as a national ...
’s
Cynthia Slater Cynthia Slater (1945–1989) was the cofounder of the second BDSM organization founded in the United States (after The Eulenspiegel Society), a San Francisco, California based BDSM education and support group known as the Society of Janus, which ...
Non-Fiction Article Award for "Thom Gunn (1929-2004)".


Bibliography

* 1954: ''Fighting Terms,'' Fantasy Press, Oxford * 1957: ''The Sense of Movement,'' Faber, London * 1961: ''My Sad Captains and Other Poems,'' Faber, London * 1962: ''Selected poems by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes,'' Faber, London * 1966: ''Positives,'' verses by Thom Gunn, photographs by Ander Gunn, London: Faber & Faber, 1966 * 1967: ''Touch'' * 1971: ''Moly'' * 1974: ''To the Air'' * 1976: ''Jack Straw's Castle'' * 1979: ''Selected Poems 1950–1975'' * 1982: ''The Occasions of Poetry'', essays (expanded US edition, 1999) * 1982: ''Talbot Road''Cox, Michael, editor, ''The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature'', Oxford University Press, 2004, * 1982: ''The Passages of Joy'' * 1982: "The Menace" (published by ManRoot in San Francisco) * 1986: "The Hurtless Trees" (published by Jordan Davies in New York) * 1992: ''The Man With Night Sweats'' * 1992: ''Old Stories'' (poetry) * 1993: ''Collected Poems'' * 1993: ''Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview (Poets on Poetry)'', 1993, * 1994: ''Collected Poems'' * 1998: ''Frontiers of Gossip'' * 2000: ''Boss Cupid'' * 2007: ''Poems,'' selected by August Kleinzahler, London: Faber & Faber, 2007 * 2017: ''Selected Poems,'' ed. Clive Wilmer, London: Faber & Faber, 2017 * 2021: ''The letters of the Thom Gunn / selected and edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer'', London : Faber & Faber, 2021,


References


Further reading

* Campbell, J. ''Thom Gunn in conversation with James Campbell,'' Between The Lines, London, 2000. *


External links

*
Profile and poems written and audio at the Poetry ArchiveProfile and poems at the Poetry Foundation
{{DEFAULTSORT:Gunn, Thom 1929 births 2004 deaths People from Gravesend, Kent David Cohen Prize recipients Formalist poets People educated at University College School British gay writers Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty MacArthur Fellows Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry winners English LGBT poets English expatriates in the United States English male poets 20th-century English poets 20th-century English male writers 20th-century LGBT people