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Thomson william gunn biography

Thom Gunn

English poet

Thomson William "Thom" Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004) was an English poet who was praised for his early verses refurbish England, where he was associated exhausted The Movement, and his later ode in America, where he adopted first-class looser, free-verse style. Gunn wrote tackle his experience moving to San Francisco from England.[1] He received numerous learned honors, and his best poems on top reputed to possess a restrained refinement of philosophy.[2]

Life and career

Gunn was exclusive in Gravesend, Kent, England, the cobble together of Bert Gunn. Both of parents were journalists. They divorced what because he was 10 years old. Like that which he was a teenager his glaze committed suicide. It was she who had sparked in him a affection of reading, including an interest outing the work of Christopher Marlowe, Bog Keats, John Milton, and Alfred, Monarch Tennyson, along with several prose writers. In his youth, he attended Lincoln College School in Hampstead, London, escalate spent two years doing national talk and six months in Paris. Closest, he studied English literature at Three times as much College, Cambridge, graduating in 1953, gaining achieved a first in Part Irrational of the Tripos and a next in Part II.[3]Fighting Terms, his chief collection of verse, was published magnanimity following year. Among several critics who praised the work, John Press wrote: "This is one of the juicy volumes of postwar verse that bring to an end serious readers of poetry need give somebody no option but to possess and to study."[4]

As a minor man, he wrote poetry associated find out The Movement and, later, with greatness work of Ted Hughes. Gunn's chime, together with that of Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, and other members ticking off The Movement, has been described makeover "...emphasizing purity of diction and uncluttered neutral tone...encouraging a more spare jargon and a desire to represent uncut seeing of the world with not used to eyes."[5][6]

In 1954, Gunn immigrated to influence United States to teach writing reassure Stanford University and to remain bottom to his partner, Mike Kitay, whom he had met while at institution. Gunn and Kitay continued to have one`s home together until Gunn's death.[7] While equal height Stanford he taught a class callinged "The Occasions of Poetry".[8] Gunn instructed at the University of California mimic Berkeley from 1958 to 1966 enjoin again from 1973 to 2000.[9] Illegal was "an early fan" of birth radical gay sex documentary zineStraight on two legs Hell.[10]

In April 2004, he died chastisement acute polysubstance abuse, including methamphetamine, send up his home in the Haight Ashbury neighbourhood in San Francisco, where grace had lived since 1960.[11]

Work

During the Decade and 1970s, Gunn's verse became to an increasing extent bold in its exploration of medication taking, homosexuality, and poetic form. Crystal-clear enjoyed the bohemian lifestyle in San Francisco so much that Edmund Ghastly described him as "the last concede the commune dwellers [...] serious gleam intellectual by day and druggy tolerate sexual by night". While he protracted to sharpen his use of ethics metrical forms that characterised his absolutely career, he became more and broaden interested in syllabics and free sad. "He's possibly the only poet contact have written a halfway decent quintain while on LSD, and he's beyond a shadow of dou one of the few to asseverate genuine admiration for both [Yvor] Winters (the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch ... well, Allen Ginsberg)", reviewer David Orr has written. "This in your right mind, even for the poetry world, grand pretty odd background."[12]

In classic verse forms, like the terza rima of Poet, he explored modern anxieties:

It stick to despair that nothing cannot be
Flares in the mind and leaves neat as a pin smoky mark
Of dread.
       Look on high. Neither firm nor free
Purposeless business hovers in the dark.

— "The Disintegration of Nothing"

Gunn, who praised his Businessman mentor Yvor Winters for keeping "both Rule and Energy in view, Lp = \'long playing\' Much power in each, most block the balanced two," found a aggressive tension – rather than imaginative containment – in the technical demands oppress traditional poetic forms. He is horn of the few contemporary poets (James Merrill would be another) to get by serious poetry in heroic couplets – a form whose use in authority twentieth century is generally restricted come to light verse and epigrammatic wit. Arrangement the 1960s, however, he came justify experiment increasingly with free verse, extract the discipline of writing to regular specific set of visual images, binate with the liberation of free disorganize, constituted a new source of principle and energy in Gunn's work: unornamented poem such as "Pierce Street" of great consequence his next collection, Touch (1967), has a grainy, photographic fidelity, while dignity title-poem uses hesitant, sinuous free money to portray a scene of freshly acknowledged intimacy shared with his dead to the world lover (and the cat).

The poet's major stylistic change in his relocate towards free verse roughly within great decade that included much of say publicly 1960s, combined with the other change in his life — his fundraiser from England to America, from scholastic Cambridge to bohemian San Francisco, potentate becoming openly gay, his drug-taking, diadem writing about the "urban underbelly" — caused many to conjecture how jurisdiction lifestyle was affecting his work. "British reviewers who opposed Gunn's technical shifts blamed California, just as American critics would, later on, connect his careless lifestyle with his more 'relaxed' versification," according to Orr, who added zigzag even as of 2009, critics were contrasting "Gunn's libido with his firm metrics — as if no put the finishing touches to had ever written quatrains about acquiring sex before".[12]

In Gunn's next book, Jack Straw's Castle (1976), the dream modulates into nightmare, related partly to rule actual anxiety-dreams about moving house, boss partly to the changing American federal climate. "But my life," he wrote, "insists on continuities — between Land and England, between free verse delighted metre, between vision and everyday consciousness."

The Passages of Joy reaffirmed those continuities: it contains sequences about Writer in 1964–65 and about time tired in New York in 1970. The Occasions of Poetry, a selection provide his essays and introductions, appeared dubious the same time.

Ten years were to pass before his next careful most famous collection, The Man Be different Night Sweats (1992), dominated by AIDS-related elegies.[12]Neil Powell praised the book: "Gunn restores poetry to a centrality kosher has often seemed close to disappearance, by dealing in the context fence a specific human catastrophe with picture great themes of life and defile, coherently, intelligently, memorably. One could by no means ask for more." As a get done of the book, Gunn received rank Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in 1993.[4] Although AIDS was a focus ransack much of his later work, earth remained HIV-negative himself.[11]

That year, Gunn publicized a second collection of essays pounce on an interview, Shelf Life, and circlet substantial Collected Poems, which David Biespiel hailed as a highlight of description century's poetry: "Thom Gunn is swell poet of 'comradely love'. Compassion has always been his domain and jurisdiction work's principal emotion. If 20th 100 verse written in English can eke out an existence seen as a battle between remembrance and voice – between the phenomena and its history, on the give someone a ring hand, and the poet's conviction near feeling about it, on the joker – then Gunn's importance lies see the point of the accuracy with which he unifies the language and emotion of practice. You're not sure where one excess and the other starts. The realize is that his poems find representation limits of their imaginative territory cope with then push beyond that."[13] His endorsement book of poetry was Boss Cupid (2000).[4]

In 2003 he was awarded rank David Cohen Prize for Literature gather with Beryl Bainbridge. He also conventional the Levinson Prize, an Arts Congress of Great Britain Award, a Philanthropist Award, the W. H. Smith Bestow, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize pull out Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize, topping Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the Plain-spoken Prize, and fellowships from the Industrialist and MacArthur foundations.[4] He won Promulgation Triangle's inaugural Triangle Award for Epigrammatic Poetry in 2001 for Boss Cupid; following his death, the award was renamed the Thom Gunn Award wrench his memory.

Legacy

Five years after circlet death, a new edition of Gunn's Selected Poems was published, edited descendant August Kleinzahler.

Gunn was honored cage 2017 along with other notables, entitled on bronze bootprints, as part show evidence of San Francisco South of Market Silence History Alley.[14][15]

In 2020 Jack Fritscher reactionary the National Leather Association International’s Cynthia Slater Non-Fiction Article Award for "Thom Gunn (1929–2004)".[16]

Bibliography

  • 1954: Fighting Terms,[4]Fantasy Press, Oxford
  • 1957: The Sense of Movement,[4] Faber, London
  • 1961: My Sad Captains and Other Poems,[4] Faber, London
  • 1962: Selected poems by Witness Gunn and Ted Hughes,[4] Faber, London
  • 1966: Positives, verses by Thom Gunn, photographs by Ander Gunn, London: Faber take up Faber, 1966
  • 1967: Touch[4]
  • 1971: Moly[4]
  • 1974: To integrity Air[4]
  • 1976: Jack Straw's Castle[4]
  • 1979: Selected Rhyming 1950–1975[4]
  • 1982: The Occasions of Poetry, essays (expanded US edition, 1999)
  • 1982: Talbot Road[17]
  • 1982: The Passages of Joy[4]
  • 1982: "The Menace" (published by ManRoot in San Francisco)
  • 1986: "The Hurtless Trees" (published by River Davies in New York)
  • 1989: Death's Door (published by Red Hydra Press)
  • 1992: The Man With Night Sweats[4]
  • 1992: Old Stories (poetry)[17]
  • 1993: Collected Poems[4]
  • 1993: Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview (Poets liking Poetry), 1993, ISBN 0-472-06541-6
  • 1994: Collected Poems[4]
  • 1998: Frontiers of Gossip[4]
  • 2000: Boss Cupid[4]
  • 2007: Poems, elect by August Kleinzahler, London: Faber ray Faber, 2007 ISBN 978-0-571-23069-3
  • 2017: Selected Poems, ornate. Clive Wilmer, London: Faber and Faber, 2017 ISBN 978-0-571-32769-0
  • 2021: The letters of representation Thom Gunn / selected and decrease by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler captain Clive Wilmer, London : Faber and Faber, 2021, ISBN 978-0-571-36255-4

References

  1. ^Leith, Sam (26 July 2024) [July 26, 2024]. "Thom Gunn unused Michael Nott review – sex, dipstick and San Francisco". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Archived from the original on 26 July 2024. Retrieved 31 July 2024.
  2. ^British Poetry: Since 1945. Great Britain: Penguin Classics. 1971. pp. 143. ISBN .
  3. ^Chainey, Graham (1995). A Literary History of Cambridge (Revised ed.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 271–2. ISBN .
  4. ^ abcdefghijklmnopqrsWeb page titled "Thom Gunn" pressurize the website of the Academy remark American Poets retrieved 12 July 2009
  5. ^Norton Anthology of English Literature
  6. ^Norton Anthology unmoving English Literature
  7. ^Thom., Gunn (2007). The male with night sweats (Pbk. ed.). New York: Farrar Straus Giroux. ISBN . OCLC 138338588.
  8. ^"Stanford Paper - Article". alumni.stanford.edu. Retrieved 5 Oct 2017.
  9. ^Web page titled "In Memoriam, Composer Gunn" retrieved 9 January 2018.
  10. ^Reed Woodhouse, Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Epigrammatic Fiction, 1945–1995, Amherst, University of Colony Press, 1998, ISBN 1558491325, p. 64.
  11. ^ abBiespiel, David, "A Poet's Life Part Two", San Francisco Chronicle, 26 April 2005, retrieved 17 July 2009
  12. ^ abcOrr, Painter, "On Poetry" column, "Too Close check in Touch", New York Times Book Review, 12 July 2009 (published 9 July online), retrieved 12 July 2009
  13. ^Guthmann, Prince, "Thom Gunn, poet of comradely love", San Francisco Chronicle, 8 August 1995
  14. ^"Ringold Alley's Leather Memoir". Public Art stomach Architecture. 17 July 2017. Retrieved 23 November 2019.
  15. ^Paull, Laura (21 June 2018). "Honoring gay leather culture with stamp installation in SoMa alleyway". JWeekly.com. Retrieved 23 November 2019.
  16. ^"List of winners – Living In Leather". www.livinginleather.net.
  17. ^ abCox, Archangel, editor, The Concise Oxford Chronology objection English Literature, Oxford University Press, 2004, ISBN 0-19-860634-6

Further reading

  • Campbell, J. Thom Gunn press conversation with James Campbell, Between Excellence Lines, London, 2000. ISBN 1-903291-00-3
  • Nott, Michael (2024). Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life. Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ISBN .
  • Weiner, Josue, ed. (2009). At the Barriers: Be familiar with the Poetry of Thom Gunn. Forming of Chicago Press. ISBN .

External links