Biography EssayThe paradox of Thom Gunn's achievement is best characterized by the ambiguities inherent in the word fashion. He is a "fashioning" poet, in the old-fashioned sense—a writer preo...
Read more
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
[This entry was updated by Jack W. C. Hagstrom (Columbia University) from the entry by Blake Morrison in the Concise Dictionary of British Literary Biography, volume 8, pp. 128-141.]The paradox of Tho...
Read more
In the following essay, Fraser contrasts Gunn's poetry to that of Philip Larkin.
Thom Gunn is often classed as a Movement poet but though he first became known about the same time as the other ...
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 excerpted interview, Gunn discusses his writing process, the main influences on his poetry, and the major themes and stylistic concerns of his work.
CLIVE WILMER: I wonder if we could...
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, Brown asserts that the repetitive and interconnected structure of "Misanthropos" reflects Gunn 's poetic philosophy.
If one attends to his own experience o...
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, Parini maintains that Gunn is able to balance his energetic approach to language and theme with traditional forms to create "a tense climate of balanced opposition.�...
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, Giles examines the function of self-parody in Gunn's more recent poetry.
One of the side-effects of the recent appointment of Ted Hughes as British Poet Laureate was to ...
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
In the following essay, Powell determines the role of sexuality in Gunn's poetry.
Though he will probably cringe at the thought, Thorn Gunn is the most distinguished living English gay poet, an...
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 Catharine R. Stimpson
Among modern British poets, [Thom Gunn]—like Donald Davie or Charles Tomlinson—helps to dramatize the encounter, neither churlish nor chauvinistic...
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 Davie
It makes sense to me, as an Englishman living in the United States, to say that British English has lost its innocence, where American English hasn't. At any rate...
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 M. L. Rosenthal
[Thom Gunn] is unusual among English poets in allowing himself to reveal vulnerability. Without self-pity, and often hesitantly inward, he implies a half-reluctant, a...
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 James Finn Cotter
Thom Gunn possesses the poetic gift of an ego open to Self, as [Selected Poems] demonstrates. From the start he found nonce symbols in wound, wind, lighthouse, or l...
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 Clive Wilmer
Gunn is quite consciously a writer of contrasts, who has drawn on a wide range of influences and modes. But his work none the less impresses the careful reader with its ...
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 Donald Davie
In the past, I have been persuaded by those like Colin Falck who have thought Thom Gunn's distinctive and great achievement was to have re-established creative co...
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 John Lucas
I am sorry to say that The Passages of Joy seems to me an utterly cliché-ridden collection. There are clichés of phrase: the poet speaks of being 'bur...
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 Dana Gioia
Gunn is a very versatile writer both technically and thematically. Games of Chance allows the reader to study one side of him in isolation. These eleven new poems, all wri...
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
Thom Gunn
Thom(son) (William) Gunn
