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, when I read Thom Gunn, an expatriate of longer standing, along with any able American …, that's the first overpowering impression that I get: how many more centuries of usage Gunn's English must take account of and be burdened with! (pp. 36-7)

It's [an] ultimate constriction in Gunn's poetry—not anything in his psyche but (as I believe) inherent in the British English which is his medium—that moves me most deeply. So in his "Autobiography," it isn't the London references that move me, but the enormous difficulty that British English has—having, as it were, suffered so much—in registering inclusiveness…. (p. 37)

Gunn in fact has resisted, has done his best to abjure, the facile forms that British knowingness...