Thom Gunn (August 29 1929 - April 25 2004) was a British poet.

Life

He was born Thomson William Gunn in Gravesend, Kent. In his youth, he attended University College School in Hampstead, London. Later, he read English literature at Trinity College, Cambridge, graduated in 1953, and published his first collection of verse, Fighting Terms, the following year. He died in his sleep in San Francisco, where he had lived since 1960.

Career

As a young British poet, his work was associated with The Movement. Also 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 explored society's increasingly liberal views 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")

The discipline of writing to a specific set of visual images and the liberation of free verse were both beneficial to Gunn: 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).

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)

References

• Campbell, J. Thom Gunn in conversation with James Campbell, Between The Lines, London, 2000. ISBN 1-903291-00-3

External links

• Obituary of Thom Gunn (Daily Telegraph)
• Obituary of Thom Gunn (The Scotsman)
• Study Guide to Gunn's poetry

1929 births | 2004 deaths | English poets

Thom Gunn | Thom Gunn | Thom Gunn