Thom Gunn Summary

For more than 40 years, award-winning poet Thom Gunn (born 1929) has concentrated on traditional form and, in contrast, on modern themes like LSD, panhandlers, and homosexuality. Born in England, he h... Read more

In the following essay, Pinsky explores the theme of home in Gunn's verse I am writing without any books at hand by Thom Gunn or anyone else, a few days before a complicated move—from th... Read more

In the following excerpt, Rosenthal surveys the themes of Gunn 's early verse. [Thom Gunn is an American-involved British poet] who has for a number of years taught at the University of Califor... Read more

In the following essay, Wilmer discusses the influences on Gunn's work, in particular such poets as Yvor Winters, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound. Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains, fi... Read more

In the following essay, Hulse explores the role of innocence in Gunn's verse. That generation of poets that emerged in Britain during the 'fifties, from start to finish of that long deca... Read more

In the following essay, Dodsworth examines Gunn's use of rhyme, contending that it "is intimately related to his whole style and outlook, and is worth looking at for that reason."... Read more

Critical Essay by Alan Brownjohn The title-poem of Thom Gunn's [Jack Straw's Castle] is a scary sequence which concentrates in itself most of the thematic and technical problems this con... Read more

Critical Essay by Lance Lee [Thom Gunn's work] has reached something of a culmination and turning point in Jack Straw's Castle…. (p. 108) The nature of Gunn's development c... Read more

Critical Essay by Donald Hall Eliot wrote of James that he was "difficult for English readers because he is an American; and … for Americans, because he is European…." Thom... Read more

Critical Essay by Richard Murphy With versatile literary allusions and metaphysical wit, [Thom Gunn's early poems] use the manners of the past to cope with modern situations. In this they remai... Read more

Critical Essay by P. R. King [Thom Gunn] shared the belief of The Movement poets that poetry should be well made and craftsmanlike, utilizing traditional rhythms and rhyme schemes. Many of his early p... Read more

Critical Essay by Jay Parini [Rule and Energy, two] potentially counterdestructive principles, exist everywhere in [Thom Gunn's] work, not sapping the poems of their strength but creating a ten... Read more

Critical Essay by Peter Kemp 'I can try / At least to get my snapshots accurate,' Thom Gunn remarks in one of the poems in his new collection, The Passages of Joy. The critical essays as... Read more

Critical Essay by Mark Caldwell Thom Gunn's new book of poems [The Passages of Joy] comes clean with a companion volume of essays [The Occasion of Poetry], as if someone were trying to package ... Read more

Critical Essay by John Mole The play of intelligence has always been a distinguishing mark of Thom Gunn's poetry, and his critical essays [collected in The Occasions of Poetry] show that it is ... Read more