Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004) was an Anglo-American poet whose career spanned five decades and two continents — from the tough, intellectual formalism of his early English work to the open-form celebrations and elegies of his San Francisco years — and who produced, in The Man with Night Sweats (1992), one of the defining poetic responses to the AIDS crisis. He was that rare thing: a poet who belonged to two literary cultures simultaneously (English and American) and who drew strength from both without being confined by either.

Life

Gunn was born Thomson William Gunn in Gravesend, Kent. His father was a journalist; his mother committed suicide when Gunn was fifteen — an event he addressed only obliquely in his poetry for decades. He served in National Service, attended Trinity College, Cambridge (where he published his first collection), and in 1954 moved to the United States to study with Yvor Winters at Stanford. He settled in San Francisco, where he lived for the rest of his life.

San Francisco transformed Gunn — socially, sexually, and poetically. He came out as gay (he had been discreet in England), immersed himself in the counterculture, experimented with LSD, and lived communally with his partner Mike Kitay and a household of friends. The move from English formalism to American openness — from the iambic pentameter of Fighting Terms to the syllabics and free verse of Moly (1971) and The Passages of Joy (1982) — mirrored his personal liberation.

Early Work

Fighting Terms (1954) — published when Gunn was twenty-four — announced an extraordinary talent. The poems are taut, intellectual, and muscular, influenced by Shakespeare’s sonnets, John Donne, and the existentialism of Sartre and Camus. The collection established Gunn alongside Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes in the Movement — the dominant mode of 1950s English poetry — though Gunn was always more intellectually ambitious and sexually alert than most Movement poets.

The Sense of Movement (1957) extended the early style with poems about motorcyclists, leather boys, and existential posing — “On the Move” (“One is always nearer by not keeping still”) became his most anthologised early poem.

My Sad Captains (1961) is a transitional collection, divided into two parts: the first in traditional metre, the second in syllabic verse — signalling Gunn’s shift toward American open forms.

The Man with Night Sweats (1992)

Gunn’s masterpiece is a collection written in response to the AIDS epidemic, which devastated the San Francisco gay community in the 1980s. Gunn lost dozens of friends and witnessed the decimation of an entire culture. The poems are devastatingly direct: they name the dead, describe the physical symptoms of the disease, and mourn the loss of lives and a community with a clarity and emotional power that avoid both sentimentality and aestheticisation.

The title poem — a man waking in night sweats, knowing what they signify — is one of the great modern elegies. “Lament” is a fourteen-section poem tracking a friend’s decline. “The Missing” addresses the survivors who “turn from the looking-glass” and “dare not look at what’s lost.” The collection returned Gunn to formal metre — the gravity of the subject demanded the weight of traditional form — and the result is one of the essential poetry collections of the late twentieth century.

Critical Standing

Gunn occupied an unusual critical position: too American for the English canon, too English for the American. He never won a major British prize (perhaps because he was perceived as having defected) and never won a major American prize (perhaps because he was perceived as English). But his best work — particularly The Man with Night Sweats — transcends national literary categories, and his reputation has grown steadily since his death.

Collecting Gunn

Fighting Terms (1954, Fantasy Press, Oxford) in first edition brings £200–£600. The Man with Night Sweats (1992, Faber & Faber / Farrar, Straus and Giroux) brings £20–£60. Signed copies appear occasionally.