Thom Gunn (1929-2004)

Thomson Gunn was born at Gravesend, Kent, the son of a successful London journalist. He was
educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he was a contemporary (though not a friend) of Ted
Hughes. Shortly after the publication of his first volume of verse, Fighting Terms (1954), he went to
Stanford University, California, where he studied and taught until 1958. He then taught at the
University of Berkeley from 1958 to 1966 and settled permanently in San Francisco, where he
gradually became a full-time writer rather than an academic. Gunn’s work was first associated with
the Movement, with which he shared a distrust of intellectualism and obscurity of expression. But
his inspiration soon revealed a violent energy that emerged in his later volumes (The Sense of
Movement , 1957; My Sad Captains , 1962; Jack’s Straw Castle , 1976). They show a fascination with
action and violence, often seen in contemporary phenomena such as rock music and motorbikes.
This, together with his rather flat, laconically colloquial style, make his poems an interesting mixture
of the Movement’s clear, hard idiom, and the American Beat poets’ rhythms and subject matter.

The scene he describes in his poem Black Jackets ,of 1954, is that seen in countless movies: young
people dressed in leather jackets and wearing black boots hang around in bars, spending the night
drinking beer. The leather outfit is their uniform, the scratches on it are like war decorations. There
is a deliberate refusal in these young people to conform to society, to adopt its values. The only
society they feel they belong to is the group, or the gang: ‘The Knights’, in this case.

In the silence that prolongs the span

Rawly of music when the record ends1 ,

The red-haired boy who drove a van

In weekday overalls2 but, like his friends,

Wore cycle boots and jacket here

To suit3 the Sunday hangout he was in,

Heard4 , as he stretched back from his beer,

Leather creak softly round his neck and chin.

[…]

He stretched out like a cat, and rolled5

The bitterish taste of beer upon his tongue,

And listened to a joke being told:

The present was6 the things he stayed among.

If it was only loss he wore,

He wore it to assert, with fierce devotion,

Complicity1 and nothing more.

He recollected his initiation2 ,

And one especially of the rites.

For on his shoulders they had put tattoos:

The group’s name on the left, The Knights,

And on the right the slogan Born To Lose.

Gunn was one of the first to record, in controlled, precise literary terms, this new form of juvenile
restlessness, mainly working-class, different from the typically intellectual or upper-class non-
conformism of the years 1890-1940.Gunn is a very lively artist, always ready to experiment with
metre – various syllabic combinations, regular iambic lines, free verse. As a means of enlarging
consciousness, he also experimented with LSD for a while.
Gunn’s Works

Fighting Terms (1954, revised edition 1962), his first volume of verse.

The Sense of Movement (1957), a collection of poems for which Gunn won the Somerset Maugham
Award, which he used for travel in Italy.

Selected Poems (1962), which also includes poems by Ted Hughes.

Positives (1966), a group of poems about people in London, with photographs by the poet’s brother,
Ander Gunn.

Selected Poems 1950-1975 (1979), a collection of his best and most significant poems.

Passages of Joy (1982), a confessional book whose poems deal with the poet’s most intimate and
deeply-felt experiences, including his homosexuality.

The Man with Night Sweats (1992) again deals with homosexual themes but it also analyses the
devastating effects of AIDS.