You do not have permission to edit this page, for the following reasons:

This IP address has been blocked from editing Wikipedia.
This does not affect your ability to read Wikipedia pages.
Most people who see this message have done nothing wrong. Some kinds of blocks restrict editing from specific service providers or telecom companies in response to recent abuse or vandalism, and can sometimes affect other users who are unrelated to that abuse. Review the information below for assistance if you do not believe that you have done anything wrong.

The IP address or range 34.205.0.0/16 has been blocked (disabled) by ‪ST47‬ for the following reason(s):

The IP address that you are currently using has been blocked because it is believed to be a web host provider. To prevent abuse, web hosts may be blocked from editing Wikipedia.
You will not be able to edit Wikipedia using a web host provider because it hides your IP address, much like a proxy or VPN.
We recommend that you attempt to use another connection to edit. For example, if you use a proxy or VPN to connect to the internet, turn it off when editing Wikipedia. If you edit using a mobile connection, try using a Wi-Fi connection, and vice versa. If you are using a corporate internet connection, switch to a different Wi-Fi network. If you have a Wikipedia account, please log in.
If you do not have any other way to edit Wikipedia, you will need to request an IP block exemption.

How to appeal if you are confident that your connection does not use a web host's IP address:
If you are confident that you are not using a web host, you may appeal this block by adding the following text on your talk page: ((unblock|reason=Caught by a web host block but this host or IP is not a web host. My IP address is _______. Place any further information here. ~~~~)). You must fill in the blank with your IP address for this block to be investigated. Your IP address can be determined here. Alternatively, if you wish to keep your IP address private you can use the unblock ticket request system. There are several reasons you might be editing using the IP address of a web host (such as if you are using VPN software or a business network); please use this method of appeal only if you think your IP address is in fact not a web host.

Administrators: The IP block exemption user right should only be applied to allow users to edit using web host in exceptional circumstances, and they should usually be directed to the functionaries team via email. If you intend to give the IPBE user right, a CheckUser needs to take a look at the account. This can be requested most easily at SPI Quick Checkuser Requests. Unblocking an IP or IP range with this template is highly discouraged without at least contacting the blocking administrator.

This block will expire on 05:44, 30 September 2026.

Even when blocked, you will usually still be able to edit your user talk page, as well as email administrators and other editors.

For information on how to proceed, please read the FAQ for blocked users and the guideline on block appeals. The guide to appealing blocks may also be helpful.

Other useful links: Blocking policy · Help:I have been blocked
Your IP address is in a range that has been blocked on all Wikimedia Foundation wikis. The block was made by ‪Tks4Fish‬. The reason given is Open Proxy/Webhost: Contact stewards if you are affected. .
- Start of block: 04:09, 17 February 2021
- Expiry of block: 04:09, 17 February 2024
Your current IP address is 34.205.37.3. The blocked range is 34.205.0.0/16. Please include all above details in any queries you make. If you believe you were blocked by mistake, you can find additional information and instructions in the No open proxies global policy. Otherwise, to discuss the block please post a request for review on Meta-Wiki. You could also send an email to the stewards VRT queue at stewards@wikimedia.org including all above details.

You can view and copy the source of this page:

((Short description|English poet))
((EngvarB|date=August 2014))
((Use dmy dates|date=December 2022))
((more citations needed|date=December 2020))

'''Thomson William "Thom" Gunn''' (29 August 1929 – 25 April 2004) was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with [[Movement (literature)|The Movement]], and his later poetry in America, even after moving towards a looser, free-verse style. Gunn wrote about his experience moving to San Francisco from England. He received numerous literary honors, and his best poems are reputed to possess a restrained elegance of philosophy.<ref>((Cite book|title=British Poetry: Since 1945|publisher=Penguin Classics|year=1971|isbn=014042122X|location=Great Britain|pages=[https://archive.org/details/britishpoetrysin0000unse_h9o9/page/143 143]|url-access=registration|url=https://archive.org/details/britishpoetrysin0000unse_h9o9/page/143))</ref>

== Life and career ==
Gunn was born in [[Gravesend, Kent]], England, the son of [[Bert Gunn]]. Both of his parents were journalists.  They divorced when he was 10 years old. When he was a teenager his mother killed herself. It was she who had sparked in him a love of reading, including an interest in the work of [[Christopher Marlowe]], [[John Keats]], [[John Milton]], and [[Alfred, Lord Tennyson]], along with several prose writers. In his youth, he attended [[University College School]] in Hampstead, London, then spent two years doing [[national service]] and six months in Paris. Later, he studied English literature at [[Trinity College, Cambridge]], graduating in 1953, having achieved a first in Part I of the [[Tripos]] and a second in Part II.<ref>((Cite book|title=A Literary History of Cambridge|last=Chainey|first=Graham|publisher=Cambridge University Press|year=1995|isbn=0521482445|location=Cambridge|pages=271–2|edition=Revised))</ref> ''Fighting Terms'', his first collection of verse, was published the following year. Among several critics who praised the work, John Press wrote: "This is one of the few volumes of postwar verse that all serious readers of poetry need to possess and to study."<ref name=poetsorg>Web page titled [http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/109 "Thom Gunn" at the website of the Academy of American Poets] retrieved 12 July 2009</ref>

As a young man, he wrote poetry associated with [[Movement (literature)|The Movement]] and, later, with the work of [[Ted Hughes]]. Gunn's poetry, together with that of [[Philip Larkin]], [[Donald Davie]], and other members of The Movement, has been described as "...emphasizing purity of diction and a neutral tone...encouraging a more spare language and a desire to represent a seeing of the world with fresh eyes."<ref>[http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/review/summary7ed.htm Norton Anthology of English Literature]</ref><ref>[http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/review/summary.htm Norton Anthology of English Literature]</ref>

In 1954, Gunn emigrated to the United States to teach writing at [[Stanford University]] and to remain close to his partner, Mike Kitay, whom he had met while at college. Gunn and Kitay continued to reside together until Gunn's death.<ref>((Cite book|title=The man with night sweats|last=Thom.|first=Gunn|date=2007|publisher=Farrar Straus Giroux|isbn=9780374530686|edition=Pbk.|location=New York|oclc=138338588))</ref> While at Stanford he taught a class called "The Occasions of Poetry".<ref>((Cite web|url=https://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=36092|title=Stanford Magazine - Article|website=alumni.stanford.edu|access-date=5 October 2017))</ref> Gunn taught at the [[University of California at Berkeley]] from 1958 to 1966 and again from 1973 to 2000.<ref>Web page titled [http://senate.universityofcalifornia.edu/_files/inmemoriam/html/thomsongunn.html "In Memoriam, Thomson Gunn"] retrieved 9 January 2018.</ref> He was "an early fan" of the radical gay sex documentary [[zine]] ''[[Boyd McDonald (pornographer)#Straight to hell|Straight to Hell]]''.<ref>Reed Woodhouse, ''Unlimited Embrace: A Canon of Gay Fiction, 1945–1995'', Amherst, University of Massachusetts Press, 1998, ((ISBN|1558491325)), p. 64.</ref>

In April 2004, he died of acute [[Poly drug use|polysubstance abuse]], including [[methamphetamine]], at his home in the [[Haight Ashbury]] neighbourhood in San Francisco, where he had lived since 1960.<ref name=sfgate/>

==Work==


During the 1960s and 1970s, Gunn's verse became increasingly bold in its exploration of drug taking, homosexuality, and poetic form. He enjoyed the bohemian lifestyle in San Francisco so much that [[Edmund White]] described him as "the last of the commune dwellers [...] serious and intellectual by day and druggy and sexual by night". While he continued to sharpen his use of the metrical forms that characterised his early career, he became more and more interested in [[syllabic verse|syllabics]] and [[free verse]]. "He's possibly the only poet to have written a halfway decent [[quintain (poetry)|quintain]] while on [[LSD]], and he's certainly one of the few to profess genuine admiration for both [Yvor] [[Yvor Winters|Winters]] (the archformalist) and Allen Ginsberg (the arch ... well, [[Allen Ginsberg]])", critic David Orr has written. "This is, even for the poetry world, a pretty odd background."<ref name="donyt">Orr, David, "On Poetry" column, [https://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/12/books/review/Orr-t.html?_r=1&ref=books&pagewanted=print "Too Close to Touch"], ''New York Times Book Review'', 12 July 2009 (published 9 July online), retrieved 12 July 2009</ref>

In classic verse forms, like the [[terza rima]] of [[Dante Alighieri|Dante]], he explored modern anxieties:

((poemquote|It is despair that nothing cannot be
Flares in the mind and leaves a smoky mark
Of dread.
       Look upward. Neither firm nor free
Purposeless matter hovers in the dark.|"The Annihilation of Nothing"))

Gunn, who praised his [[Stanford]] mentor [[Yvor Winters]] for keeping "both Rule and Energy in view, / Much power in each, most in the balanced two," found a productive tension – rather than imaginative restriction – in the technical demands of traditional poetic forms. He is one of the few contemporary poets ([[James Merrill]] would be another) to write serious poetry in [[heroic couplets]] – a form whose use in the twentieth century is generally restricted to [[light verse]] and epigrammatic wit. In the 1960s, however, he came to experiment increasingly with free verse, and the discipline of writing to a specific set of visual images, coupled with the liberation of free verse, constituted a new source of rule and energy in Gunn's work: a poem such as "Pierce Street" in his next collection, ''Touch'' (1967), has a grainy, photographic fidelity, while the title-poem uses hesitant, sinuous free verse to portray a scene of newly acknowledged intimacy shared with his sleeping lover (and the cat).

The poet's major stylistic change in his shift towards free verse roughly within a decade that included much of the 1960s, combined with the other changes in his life &mdash; his move from England to America, from academic Cambridge to bohemian San Francisco, his becoming openly gay, his drug-taking, his writing about the "urban underbelly" &mdash; caused many to conjecture how his lifestyle was affecting his work. "British reviewers who opposed Gunn's technical shifts blamed California, just as American critics would, later on, connect his adventurous lifestyle with his more 'relaxed' versification," according to Orr, who added that even as of 2009, critics were contrasting "Gunn's libido with his tight metrics &mdash; as if no one had ever written quatrains about having sex before".<ref name=donyt/>

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

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

Ten years were to pass before his next and most famous collection, ''The Man With Night Sweats'' (1992), dominated by AIDS-related elegies.<ref name=donyt/> [[Neil Powell (author)|Neil Powell]] praised the book: "Gunn restores poetry to a centrality it has often seemed close to losing, by dealing in the context of a specific human catastrophe with the great themes of life and death, coherently, intelligently, memorably. One could hardly ask for more." As a result of the book, Gunn received the [[Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize]] in 1993.<ref name=poetsorg/> Although AIDS was a focus of much of his later work, he remained HIV-negative himself.<ref name=sfgate>Biespiel, David, [http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2005/04/26/DDGQMCDQ941.DTL "A Poet's Life Part Two"], ''San Francisco Chronicle'', 26 April 2005, retrieved 17 July 2009</ref>

That year, Gunn published a second collection of essays with an interview, ''Shelf Life'', and his substantial'' Collected Poems'', which [[David Biespiel]] hailed as a highlight of the century's poetry: "Thom Gunn is a poet of 'comradely love'. Compassion has always been his domain and his work's principal emotion. If 20th century verse written in English can be seen as a battle between memory and voice – between the phenomena and its history, on the one hand, and the poet's conviction and feeling about it, on the other – then Gunn's importance lies in the accuracy with which he unifies the language and emotion of experience. You're not sure where one ends and the other starts. The result is that his poems find the limits of their imaginative territory and then push beyond that."<ref>Guthmann, Edward, [http://www.sfgate.com/style/article/Thom-Gunn-poet-of-comradely-love-3136823.php "Thom Gunn, poet of comradely love"], ''San Francisco Chronicle'', 8 August 1995</ref> His final book of poetry was ''Boss Cupid'' (2000).<ref name="poetsorg" />

In 2003 he was awarded the [[David Cohen Prize]] for Literature together with [[Beryl Bainbridge]]. He also received the Levinson Prize, an Arts Council of Great Britain Award, a Rockefeller Award, the W. H. Smith Award, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize, a Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Award, the Forward Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.<ref name=poetsorg/> He won [[Publishing Triangle]]'s inaugural [[Thom Gunn Award|Triangle Award for Gay Poetry]] in 2001 for ''Boss Cupid''; following his death, the award was renamed the Thom Gunn Award in his memory.

==Legacy==
Five years after his death, a new edition of Gunn's ''Selected Poems'' was published, edited by [[August Kleinzahler]].

Gunn was honored in 2017 along with other notables, named on bronze bootprints, as part of [[San Francisco South of Market Leather History Alley]].<ref>((cite web |url=http://www.artandarchitecture-sf.com/ringold-alleys-leather-memoir.html |title=Ringold Alley's ''Leather Memoir'' |publisher=Public Art and Architecture |date=17 July 2017 |access-date=23 November 2019))</ref><ref>((cite web|last=Paull |first=Laura |url=https://www.jweekly.com/2018/06/21/honoring-gay-leather-culture-with-art-installation-in-soma-alleyway/ |title=Honoring gay leather culture with art installation in SoMa alleyway |publisher=JWeekly.com |date=21 June 2018 |access-date=23 November 2019))</ref>

In 2020 [[Jack Fritscher]] received the [[National Leather Association International]]’s [[Cynthia Slater]] Non-Fiction Article Award for "Thom Gunn (1929–2004)".<ref name="auto">((Cite web|url=http://www.livinginleather.net/list-of-winners-5.html|title=List of winners – Living In Leather|website=www.livinginleather.net))</ref>

==Bibliography==

* 1954: ''Fighting Terms,''<ref name=poetsorg/> [[Fantasy Press]], Oxford
* 1957: ''The Sense of Movement,''<ref name=poetsorg/> Faber, London
* 1961: ''My Sad Captains and Other Poems,''<ref name=poetsorg/> Faber, London
* 1962: ''Selected poems by Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes,''<ref name=poetsorg/> Faber, London
* 1966: ''Positives,'' verses by Thom Gunn, photographs by Ander Gunn, London:  Faber and Faber, 1966
* 1967: ''Touch''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1971: ''Moly''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1974: ''To the Air''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1976: ''Jack Straw's Castle''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1979: ''Selected Poems 1950–1975''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1982: ''The Occasions of Poetry'', essays (expanded US edition, 1999)
* 1982: ''Talbot Road''<ref name=cocel>Cox, Michael, editor, ''The Concise Oxford Chronology of English Literature'', Oxford University Press, 2004, ((ISBN|0-19-860634-6))</ref>
* 1982: ''The Passages of Joy''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1982: "The Menace" (published by ManRoot in San Francisco)
* 1986: "The Hurtless Trees" (published by Jordan Davies in New York)
* 1989:  ''Death's Door'' (published by Red Hydra Press)
* 1992: ''The Man With Night Sweats''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1992: ''Old Stories'' (poetry)<ref name=cocel/>
* 1993: ''Collected Poems''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1993: ''Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview (Poets on Poetry)'', 1993, ((ISBN | 0-472-06541-6))
* 1994: ''Collected Poems''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 1998: ''Frontiers of Gossip''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 2000: ''Boss Cupid''<ref name=poetsorg/>
* 2007: ''Poems,'' selected by August Kleinzahler, London:  Faber and Faber, 2007 ((ISBN|978-0-571-23069-3))
* 2017: ''Selected Poems,'' ed. Clive Wilmer, London:  Faber and Faber, 2017 ((ISBN|978-0-571-32769-0))
* 2021: ''The letters of the Thom Gunn / selected and edited by Michael Nott, August Kleinzahler and Clive Wilmer'', London : Faber and Faber, 2021, ((ISBN | 978-0-571-36255-4))

==References==
((reflist))

==Further reading==
* Campbell, J. ''Thom Gunn in conversation with James Campbell,'' Between The Lines, London, 2000. ((ISBN|1-903291-00-3))
* ((cite book |editor=Weiner, Joshua |title=At the Barriers: On the Poetry of Thom Gunn |publisher=University of Chicago Press |year=2009 |isbn=978-0-226-89044-9))

==External links==
* ((cite journal| url=http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/1626/the-art-of-poetry-no-72-thom-gunn| title=Thom Gunn, The Art of Poetry No. 72| journal=The Paris Review| date=Summer 1995| author=  Clive Wilmer | volume=Summer 1995| issue=135))
*[https://web.archive.org/web/20070505210615/http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=7086 Profile and poems written and audio at the Poetry Archive]
*[http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/thom-gunn Profile and poems at the Poetry Foundation]
*[https://archivesspace.amherst.edu/repositories/2/resources/281 Jack W. C. Hagstrom (AC 1955) Collection of Thom Gunn Bibliography Papers] at the Amherst College Archives & Special Collections

((David Cohen Prize))
((Authority control))

((DEFAULTSORT:Gunn, Thom))
[[Category:1929 births]]
[[Category:2004 deaths]]
[[Category:People from Gravesend, Kent]]
[[Category:David Cohen Prize recipients]]
[[Category:Formalist poets]]
[[Category:People educated at University College School]]
[[Category:British gay writers]]
[[Category:Alumni of Trinity College, Cambridge]]
[[Category:University of California, Berkeley College of Letters and Science faculty]]
[[Category:MacArthur Fellows]]
[[Category:Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry winners]]
[[Category:English LGBT poets]]
[[Category:English expatriates in the United States]]
[[Category:English male poets]]
[[Category:20th-century English poets]]
[[Category:20th-century English male writers]]
[[Category:20th-century English LGBT people]]

Pages transcluded onto the current version of this page (help):

Thom Gunn (edit)
Template:Ambox (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Authority control (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Blockquote (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Blockquote/styles.css (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Catalog lookup link (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Cite book (view source) (protected)
Template:Cite journal (view source) (protected)
Template:Cite web (view source) (protected)
Template:Comma separated entries (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:DMCA (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Dated maintenance category (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Dated maintenance category (articles) (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:David Cohen Prize (edit)
Template:EngvarB (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:FULLROOTPAGENAME (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Find sources mainspace (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Hlist/styles.css (view source) (protected)
Template:ISBN (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:If empty (view source) (protected)
Template:Main other (view source) (protected)
Template:More citations needed (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Navbox (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Ns has subpages (view source) (protected)
Template:Pagetype (view source) (protected)
Template:Poem quote (view source) (extended confirmed protected)
Template:Poemquote (view source) (semi-protected)
Template:Reflist (view source) (protected)
Template:Reflist/styles.css (view source) (protected)
Template:SDcat (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Short description (view source) (protected)
Template:Short description/lowercasecheck (view source) (protected)
Template:Use dmy dates (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Yesno (view source) (protected)
Template:Yesno-no (view source) (template editor protected)
Template:Yesno-yes (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Arguments (view source) (protected)
Module:Authority control (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Authority control/auxiliary (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Authority control/config (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Catalog lookup link (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Category handler (view source) (protected)
Module:Category handler/blacklist (view source) (protected)
Module:Category handler/config (view source) (protected)
Module:Category handler/data (view source) (protected)
Module:Category handler/shared (view source) (protected)
Module:Check for unknown parameters (view source) (protected)
Module:Check isxn (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Citation/CS1 (view source) (protected)
Module:Citation/CS1/COinS (view source) (protected)
Module:Citation/CS1/Configuration (view source) (protected)
Module:Citation/CS1/Date validation (view source) (protected)
Module:Citation/CS1/Identifiers (view source) (protected)
Module:Citation/CS1/Utilities (view source) (protected)
Module:Citation/CS1/Whitelist (view source) (protected)
Module:Citation/CS1/styles.css (view source) (protected)
Module:Disambiguation (view source) (protected)
Module:Disambiguation/templates (view source) (protected)
Module:EditAtWikidata (view source) (protected)
Module:Find sources (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Find sources/config (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Find sources/links (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Find sources/templates/Find sources mainspace (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:If empty (view source) (protected)
Module:Message box (view source) (protected)
Module:Message box/ambox.css (view source) (protected)
Module:Message box/configuration (view source) (protected)
Module:Namespace detect/config (view source) (protected)
Module:Namespace detect/data (view source) (protected)
Module:Navbar (view source) (protected)
Module:Navbar/configuration (view source) (protected)
Module:Navbar/styles.css (view source) (protected)
Module:Navbox (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Navbox/configuration (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Navbox/styles.css (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Ns has subpages (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Pagetype (view source) (protected)
Module:Pagetype/config (view source) (protected)
Module:Redirect (view source) (protected)
Module:SDcat (view source) (template editor protected)
Module:Separated entries (view source) (protected)
Module:String (view source) (protected)
Module:TableTools (view source) (protected)
Module:Unsubst (view source) (protected)
Module:Yesno (view source) (protected)

Return to Thom Gunn.

Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thom_Gunn"