Gunn, Thom(son) William

Gunn, Thom(son) William (1929-2004), British-born poet, resident for many years in San Francisco. Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Stanford University, California. He served in the British Army between 1948 and 1950, and taught at the University of California between 1958 and 1966 and, part-time, since 1975. At Cambridge he was taught by F. R. Leavis, who enthused Gunn and encouraged a passion for the work of John Donne and William Shakespeare that was always evident in Gunn's poetry.

Gunn's first collection, Poems, was published in 1953; the two volumes that swiftly followed, Fighting Terms (1954) and The Sense of Movement (1957), established Gunn's reputation. Employing traditional forms and metres and vivid imagery, the pieces have a noticeable toughness and muscularity. The subject matter, even before Gunn wrote freely about his homosexuality, is frequently homoerotic. His early poem “On The Move” celebrates leather-clad motorcyclists, drawing from their restless strength a philosophical conclusion:

These tributes to masculinity were also part of a poetic manifesto; “Lines for a Book” contains the couplet “I praise the overdogs, from Alexander / To those who would not play with Stephen Spender”, in reference to the Stephen Spender poem “My Parents Kept Me From Children Who Were Rough”. Gunn had at this point become associated with The Movement, a loose grouping of poets (including Philip Larkin, Kingsley Amis, and D. J. Enright) who rejected the middle-class effeteness of poets like Spender, as well as Modernism and Romanticism, preferring a more sceptical, empirical stance, and placing a greater emphasis on orthodox forms and metres.

His move to the United States, where he read the poetry of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, allowed Gunn a steady shift in sensibility. Moving from traditional metres to free verse via syllabics (see Versification), Gunn's voice became less aggressive, and more tender and tentative. He also began writing about hallucinogenic drugs (Moly, 1971 and Jack Straw's Castle, 1976), and homosexuality (The Passages of Joy, 1982). His first major collection after that, The Man With Night Sweats, was published in 1992, and contains a number of moving poems and elegies about friends with AIDS:

Gunn continued with his themes of love and death in the AIDS era with Boss Cupid (2000) and also published a volume of his critical essays, Shelf Life, (1995). His Collected Poems was published in 1994.