Thom Gunn
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Thom Gunn (29 August 1929 - 25 April 2004) was an Anglo-American poet.
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[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 2004 he died in his sleep 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. In 1954, he 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. 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.
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- Look upward. Neither firm nor free
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- 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).
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[edit] References
- Campbell, J. Thom Gunn in conversation with James Campbell, Between The Lines, London, 2000. ISBN 1-903291-00-3
