Introduction
It's now thirty years since the first Selected Thom Gunn. The poet one finds in these pages is a quite different quantity from the earlier Thom Gunn. From this distance in time, and with the work of the seventies, eighties and nineties before us, the nature and scale of his achievement, as well as how truly anomalous a poet he really was, come into perspective. It all changes the landscape a bit upon reconsideration.
Gunn is an Elizabethan poet in modern dress. To be sure, an Elizabethan poet passed through many filters, historical, cultural, intellectual, not least the filter of Modernism; but it does no harm when thinking of Gunn's poetry to think of Marlowe, Shakespeare, or Jonson transposed to the San Francisco Bay area in the second part of the twentieth century, living through and making poetic record of the raucous, druggy late sixties, through to the "plague" of the late eighties and nineties, and its aftermath. It's an exciting prospect to conjure with. Gunn is an exciting poet.
Thom Gunn enjoyed large success early, which, more than anything else, seems to have confused the matter. His literary sources will probably seem remote to the contemporary reader, especially the younger reader. However the weltschmerz of postwar Britain may have diffused into the literary culture, certain tendencies are clearly evident in the early poetry of Gunn and in the work of older contemporaries like Larkin who were grouped together, however artificially, as poets of the Movement.
It was around the time of the original publication of this book [Fighting Terms] 1954 or perhaps a little earlier, that I first heard of something called the Movement. To my surprise, I also learned that I was a member of it. . . . It originated as a half-joke by Anthony Hartley writing in the Spectator and then was perpetuated as a kind of journalistic convenience. What poets like Larkin, Davie, Elizabeth Jennings, and I had in common at that time was that we were deliberately eschewing Modernism, and turning back, though not very thoroughgoingly, to traditional resources in structure and method.
(From "My Life Up to Now," collected in The Occasions of Poetry)
Whatever the consanguinities of style and intent, if there was one writer these poets were trying not to sound like, it would have been Dylan Thomas, first and foremost. Reaction had already set in against his overheated rhetoric and what one commentator called his id-Romanticism. Likewise, the New Apocalypse poets who published in Poetry London in the forties. These young poets were aiming for a poetry that was tough, lean, smart, and up-to-date. The inclination was strongly nativist, which for Gunn meant the Elizabethans and the ballads, and out of the ballads, Hardy. Of the older living poets Gunn was strongly attracted to Auden, for his wit (in the older sense of the word), mastery of forms, and the fact that he was accessible and of his time.
F. R. Leavis's writings about poetry continue to make for bracing reading, especially on the heels of thirty years of structuralism and post-structuralism. Whether one agrees with him or not, the seriousness and muscular intelligence of his arguments are palpable in the syntax of his essays, as I'm certain they were in the lectures Gunn attended at Cambridge in the early fifties. Leavis argued for a poetry of the waking world, for the movement of modern speech. He favored clear edges, the exercise of intelligence and will. His thrust was away from Romanticism, especially Romanticism's influence on Victorian and Pre-Raphaelite poetry. What Leavis seems to have detested most was the cloudy, languid dreamworld of poetry. And what he championed was a poetry of passionate intellectual interest, bare and subtle, responsive to the age it was written in and expressed in the idiom and rhythms of that age. Sounds modernist, doesn't it? Well, yes and no. In any event, when Gunn's first book came out in 1954, poems he'd written as an undergraduate, the voice and forms were decidedly traditional while the attitudes and subject matter were very now for then: in Gunn's case now involved existentialism and a rather heroic, alienated self.
The popular line on Gunn's poetry is that his first collection, Fighting Terms, and his next, The Sense of Movement, established him as one of the young lions among poets of his generation; then he came unglued, rather lost, over the years after his move to the States, and with his 1971 collection, Moly, had utterly gone down the tubes. Here is Edward Lucie-Smith from the Penguin collection British Poetry since 1945:
Around 1960, it sometimes seemed as if all the poetry being written in England was being produced by a triple-headed creature called the "Larkin-Hughes-Gunn." Of this triumvirate it is Gunn whose reputation has worn least well. The youngest of the Movement poets, he established himself with his first volume. A mixture of the literary and the violent, this appealed both to restless youth and academic middle-age . . . Afterwards Gunn went to America . . .
Kenneth McLeish, in another Penguin compendium, Companion to the Arts in the Twentieth Century, writes:
On present showing, Gunn is living proof of that sad cliché that first thoughts are always the best . . . His collection, Fighting Terms, was one of the best poetry-books of its time: a combination of urgent style and that sparky, intellectual involvement with "issues" . . . Gunn became a professor at Berkeley. He continued to publish . . . [but] only My Sad Captains (1961) contains anything to match . . . or remotely rival his own spectacular early work.
Fighting Terms is an extraordinarily accomplished, smart, and precocious performance by a university student. It's difficult to conceive of such a performance today by one so young. There's a real muscularity and rigor in the handling of meter, as well as considerable discipline, rare in one that age, in his control of idea and structure, seeing through to the end the extended metaphors he favored at that time in his work. The poet's enormous gifts are already very much in evidence.
Gunn was twenty-two when he entered university, having completed his National Service and having worked briefly in Paris. There is one especially fine example of his early style in the book "Tamer and Hawk," seamless in execution and convincing all the way through, but the rest of the book reads now as top-of-the-line juvenilia, interesting only with respect to the later work. In truth, very few actually read the book at the time (it was published in an edition of only three hundred copies), but it established his reputation, a reputation amplified and consolidated by The Sense of Movement, published by Faber in 1957. Gunn was now famous in England, his work enjoying "a public," insofar as a public was to be found for poetry at the time. However, three years before, Gunn had removed himself to California where he would, as was alleged over and over, begin his long decline, undone by sunshine, LSD, queer sex, and free verse. It will now have taken more than a generation to set the record straight.
The Sense of Movement is a broad advance but still a very long way from the accomplishment of his mature work. Gunn would have been at Stanford when most of these poems were written and studying with Yvor Winters. Winters, like Leavis, was another brilliant, forceful personality. Those types of mentoring individual can be poison for young writers, but Gunn, as he would throughout his writing life, would take what he could use and move along. Part of his talent, or good fortune, from early on, was to make good decisions, often tough ones. Indeed, the writing of a poem involves a series of hard decisions, often daunting ones.
Winters, like Leavis, very much believed in intellectual rigor in poetry, and moral penetration as well. Like Leavis he was serious about literature; it was the most important thing in the world. You get that from the writings of both men. Gunn would continue to pursue his interest in the Elizabethans and their successors, most significantly Jonson and Greville. Winters was at his most brilliant and enthusiastic when discussing the Elizabethans, in particular the shorter Elizabethan lyric.
I had long liked the Elizabethans. I knew Nashe's few poems well, Ralegh's, and even some of Greville's; Donne had been, after Shakespeare, my chief teacher. So I already shared some of Winters' tastes, and though I liked the ornate and the metaphysical I needed no persuading to also like the plain style.
("On a Drying Hill: Yvor Winters," from Shelf Life)
But Gunn would at this point also be introduced to W. C. Williams and read with more understanding and depth Stevens, Pound, and other Americans that Winters valued. Under Winters's tutelage Gunn would come to understand the logical continuum from poetry of the English Renaissance to the Modernists. It is an understanding and interest that would color his own poetry from that point on.
The writing in The Sense of Movement is measurably crisper and more assured than the earlier collection, also less rhetorical. Gunn starts out as a literary writer and remains so throughout his career, but the poetry in Gunn's first few books feels at a remove from the world. Later on his reading and world would come to better inform each other and with great effect, but not quite yet. What does begin to show up clearly in the poetry is Gunn's fascination with the city as subject matter and his use of what is called the Plain Style.
Gunn came to Baudelaire early, before Cambridge, and stayed with him. The poems from Les Tableaux parisiens in Les Fleurs du mal made as much of an impression on him and his writing as Donne and Shakespeare later would. In fact, it would be difficult to overstate what Gunn drew from the Baudelairean sensibility about cities, in particular the interest in the low, the squalid. In The Sense of Movement Gunn has begun to stretch out a bit more, trying out syllabics in a couple of poems, and discover his real subject matter. The city will become his central theme, character and event being played out on its street corners, in its rooms, bars, bathhouses, stairwells, taxis. There is also evidence in the 1957 book that Gunn is beginning, here and there, to relax toward his material, to drop the lofty distanced tone and actually nose around a bit. He's getting interested and the poetry is beginning to get interesting.
The Plain Style is what it sounds to be: unembellished, clear; in diction and movement inclining toward the way people speak. It doesn't call attention to itself but serves the material of the poem. Among the ancients, Horace, in his Epistle to Florus, advises the poet "to master the rhythms and measures of genuine life." Among sixteenth-and seventeenth-century writers the term Plain Style distinguishes itself from the ornamental figures of the Petrarchan Style. Ben Jonson is probably its chief exemplar. Gunn liked no poet better.
The Plain Style, however, is not to be confused with the colloquial. Although transparently an exponent of the Plain Style, Gunn does not sound especially "plain" to the contemporary reader. His diction is lean and unadorned—chaste, as the poet Clive Wilmer describes it—the argument and exposition are clear, trim, and direct, but the tone may sound oddly formal to the twenty-first-century reader. He is not trying for the cadences of speech. The meter and rhyme of most of the poetry notwithstanding, the voice tends to feel anachronistic; the "I" of the poetry carrying almost no tangible personality. This can be upsetting or disappointing to the contemporary reader, especially the American reader, accustomed to the dramatic personalities behind the voices in recent poetry: Lowell, Berryman, Sexton, Ginsberg, Plath, Hughes, et al. Even in Larkin there exists a strong, identifiable persona, no matter how recessive the tone.
This absence of personality is by design in Gunn's poetry. The "I" in the poems is the disinterested "I" of the Elizabethans, and back further still, the "I" of the ballads, and out of the ballads the "I" in Hardy's poetry. One can also encounter it in Bunting's "Briggflatts," a poem of major importance to Gunn later on in his career. In an interview, Gunn tells us quite explicitly what he's up to with regard to voice:
People do have difficulties with my poetry, difficulties in locating the central voice or central personality. But I'm not aiming for central voice and I'm not aiming for central personality. I want to be an Elizabethan poet. I want to write with the same anonymity that you get in the Elizabethans and I want to move around between forms in the same way somebody like Ben Jonson did. At the same time I want to write in my own century.
This stance was to upset many readers and reviewers, who, as Donald Davie remarks in an essay on Gunn, were affronted by Gunn's impersonality, having become accustomed to a rhetorical theory of poetry whereby the writer's prime duty is to serve the reader's rather than the writer's own experience, that reader conceiving of poetry as a "service industry." Davie goes on to say that this perceived impertinence on Gunn's part was aggravated by the nature of the subject matter Gunn was treating—sexual abandon, drugs, etc.—which the reader felt so emotionally about and Gunn treated so coolly. "I distrust myself with rhetoric," Gunn told James Campbell in a late interview, "because it would be a form of falsification."
Which brings us to the next line on Gunn's career: after going to hell in America, squandering his poetic gifts, Gunn was rehabilitated by the AIDS crisis and became an important poet once again because be became a feeling poet at last. The truth is that the trajectory of Gunn's career can be easily enough charted and does not at all resemble what the self-perpetuating notions contend. He grows from book to book until he publishes Moly in 1971.
You can see it coming, especially in the poems in Part II of My Sad Captains, in 1961. Gunn addresses the change in his work in an autobiographical note written for Faber and Faber in November of 1972:
The first half [of the book] is the culmination of my old style—metrical, rational, but maybe starting to get a little more humane. The second half consists of a taking up of that humaner impulse in a series of syllabic poems . . . which were . . . really only a way of teaching myself to write free verse.
Of the first poem, "In Santa Maria del Popolo," Gunn writes: "Here at last I begin some kind of critique of the heroic."
As splendid as so many of the poems in My Sad Captains are, the advance to the plateau of Moly, some ten years later, is startling. It's reasonable enough, I suppose, when one considers that Gunn was in his midthirties when he wrote Moly. His skills and intelligence were abundantly in evidence up to that point, but to this reader, at least, he was a more accomplished poet than an important one. It's not untoward or irrelevant to speculate on the personal: he'd recently been through a bad bout of hepatitis; he'd quit his full-time teaching job at Berkeley; he'd come out more publicly as a gay man; he'd begun dropping acid. But plenty of artists pass through personal change and crisis and their work is none the better for it; in fact, more often than not the work suffers on account of it.
Moly begins dramatically with a poem of change, metamorphosis. It is one of the thrilling moments in twentieth-century poetry:
Something is taking place.
Horns bud bright in my hair.
My feet are turning hoof.
And Father, see my face
—Skin that was damp and fair
Is barklike and, feel, rough.
("Rites of Passage")
The transformation motif continues through the next poem, the title poem "Moly," and gains tremendous pitch through the movement within its couplets:
Into what bulk has method disappeared?
Like ham, streaked. I am gross—grey, gross, flap-eared.
The pale-lashed eyes my only human feature.
My teeth tear, tear. I am the snouted creature
That bites through anything, root, wire, or can.
If I was not afraid I'd eat a man.
Oh a man's flesh already is in mine.
Hand and foot poised for risk. Buried in swine.
I root and root, you think that it is greed,
It is, but I seek out a plant I need.
Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy,
To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly [. . .]
Whatever was left of Gunn's considerable late-fifties reputation in Britain, Moly finished it off. One reviewer wrote of the book: "Without exception the Moly poems are dead. Their failure is not essentially a failure of tone. They do not smell." And when he had sent some of these poems to Yvor Winters in the course of the sixties, his old mentor wrote back that maybe he should try writing prose. Change has a cost, and from Winters himself, had he not known it already, Gunn had had impressed upon him that career means nothing, only one's art and honesty count for anything. As Edwin Muir noted, early in Gunn's career: "He is endowed and plagued by an unusual honesty. His poems are a desperate inquiry, how to live and act in a world perpetually moving."
The mid-to late sixties generated a lot of garbage in the arts, junk that really started piling up in the seventies. A loose man, given as much permission as he wants, will make a very loose poem. The era was a time of gross self-indulgence. Gunn on the other hand flourished: instead of going prolix and slack (listen once more to the ten-minute guitar riffs and saxophone solos of the time) he relaxed into his mature voice. A transformation had taken place.
His poetry could accommodate a bit of relaxing. He will remain preeminently a poet of closure, intelligence, and will, as evidenced in the Moly poems. There was not an aleatory bone in Gunn's body. He's Handel, not John Cage. Even in the free verse that becomes a part of his arsenal the procedures are not especially Modernist: not at all elliptical, no collage or fractured syntax, nothing in medias fires—none of that. His free-verse poems have a beginning, a middle, and an end. They develop rationally. The diction remains plain, the argument direct. His free verse is not at all prosey, and possesses its own kind of subdued music. Gunn owes a considerable debt in the nonmetrical poems to W. C. Williams, especially with regard to Williams's short line and use of enjambment. The subject matter is usually city life, often squalid, his characters the vulnerable, much of it along the lines of Baudelaire's Les Tableaux parisiens. The sexual gains increasing prominence in the work: the city for Gunn, specifically San Francisco, becomes a kind of sexual New Jerusalem, a bit seedy around the edges, where the utopian notion of a Whitmanesque brotherhood of man becomes a recurring theme. But what has changed most demonstrably in the poetry in Moly and beyond is Gunn's relationship with his environment. We are no longer dealing so much with allegories or notions of the city or character: the poems are now trained on actual people and places. If earlier on in the poetry it seemed as if there was no there there, now the there is very much in evidence.
From this point on another recurrent theme is personal abandon. He likes to treat these subjects, to contain them, in rhyme and meter. Gunn's experiences on LSD had become hugely important and instructive for him, and made their way into his poetry.
Metre seemed to be the proper form for the LSD-related poems, though at first I didn't understand why. Later I rationalized about it thus. The acid trip is unstructured, it opens you up to countless possibilities, you hanker after the infinite. The only way I could give myself any control over the presentation of these experiences, and so could be true to them, was by trying to render the infinite through the finite, the unstructured through the structured. Otherwise there was the danger of the experience's becoming so distended that it would simply unravel like fog before the wind in the unpremeditated movement of free verse.
("My Life Up to Now," from The Occasions of Poetry)
The poem "At the Centre," from the Moly collection, written during an LSD trip on the fenced-in, graveled roof of a Hamm beer brewery, is a wonderful example.
What is this steady pouring that
Oh, wonder.
The blue line bleeds and on the gold one draws.
Currents of image widen, braid, and blend
—Pouring in cascade over me and under—
To one all-river. Fleet it does not pause,
The sinewy flux pours without start or end.
What place is this
And what is it that broods
Barely beyond its own creation's course,
And not abstracted from it, not the Word,
But overlapping like the wet low clouds
The rivering images—their unstopped source,
Its roar unheard from being always heard.
It seemed that as a poet Thom Gunn became more adventuresome as he grew older. The intellectual rigor, moral curiosity, and firmness of structure that Gunn brought to his work from the beginning never left him but the poetry itself opened and deepened over time. Gunn himself had grown, "by a cubit's length," as he liked to quote his former Cambridge teacher Helen Shire, of those who had read through Shakespeare with understanding. "Gunn dug further than any of his contemporaries," Donald Davie wrote, "into the English of earlier centuries, so as to recover that phase of English— Donne's, Marlowe's, above all Shakespeare's—in which language could register without embarrassment on the one hand the sleazy and squalid, and on the other hand the affirmative, the frankly heroic."
On the heels of Moly come Jack Straw's Castle, The Passages of Joy, the magisterial The Man with Night Sweats, the Collected Poems, and finally Boss Cupid, this last, containing, among other memorable pieces, "The Gas-poker," the poem about his mother's suicide, a subject it took Gunn over fifty years to engage in verse. Predictably, he chose meter and rhyme to contain this most difficult and troubling episode in his life. The tone of it, as ever, is dispassionate, the voice anonymous, and the pathos of the event all the more powerful on account of it.
The level of achievement from Part II of My Sad Captains through to Boss Cupid is extraordinary, not least for having been sustained for forty years, years of real neglect for the work both in Britain and America. And during those years Gunn continued to challenge himself through the medium, sometimes stumbling, but never standing pat, and above all trying to make sense of the world, his world, as honestly as possible, steering clear of the rhetorical and self-congratulatory at every turn.
But we might well look to the words of Fulke Greville, writing of his own work, to best characterize Gunn's poetry from the sixties on:
For my own part I found my creeping genius more fixed upon the images of life, than the images of wit, and therefore chose not to write to them on whose foot the black ox had not already trod, as the proverb is, but to those only that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world, such as having lost the sight of their gardens and groves, study to sail on a right course among rocks and quicksands.
AUGUST KLEINZAHLER
Excerpted from THOM GUNN Selected Poems by August Kleinzahler
Copyright © 2007 by August Kleinzahler
Published in 2009 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
All rights reserved. This work is protected under copyright laws and reproduction is strictly prohibited. Permission to reproduce the material in any manner or medium must be secured from the Publisher.