THE POETRY OF THOM GUNN, B.J.C. HINTON, M.A. THESIS FOR FACULTY OF ARTS BIRMINGHAM UNIVERSITY. Department of English 1974 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. SYNOPSIS This thesis is concerned with investigating the poetry of Thorn Gunn in greater detail than has been done before, and with relating it to its full literary and historical context. In doing this, the thesis refers to many uncollected poems and reviews by ,Gunn that are here listed and discussed for the first time, as are many critical reviews of Gunn's work. The Introduction attempts to put Gunn's poetry in perspective, section one consisting of a short biography, while the second and third sections analyse, in turn, the major philosophical and literary influences on his work. Section four contains a brief account of the most important critical views on Gunn's work. The rest of the thesis consists of six chapters that examine Gunn's work in detail, discussing every poem he has so far published, and tracing the development his work has shown. Each chapter begins with a discussion of the reviews that the book under discussion attracted when it first appeared. The thesis, as a whole, attempts to show that Gunn's poetry has been subject to constant development, and that it is this capacity for change that makes Gunn's work so valuable. Number of words = c 78,000 To my parents CONTENTS Introduction P- 1 Chapter One - Fighting Terms P- 36 Chapter Two - The Sense of Movement p. 78 Chapter Three - My Sad Captains P- 124 Chapter Four - Positives P- 162 Chapter Five - Touch P- 198 Chapter Six - Moly P- 252 Bibliography P- 298 Note on the text The following abbreviations are used in the notes at the end of each chapter. FT (54) - Fighting Terms (Fantasy Press) 1954 FT (62) - Fighting Terms (Faber and Faber) 1962 SM - The Sense of Movement MSC - My Sad Captains P - Positives T - Touch M - Moly 1. INTRODUCTION Thorn Gunn is a difficult poet to assess, both because of the tortuous and involved nature of some of his verse, and because of the widespread, sometimes conflicting, influences on his style and subject matter. No other modern English poet has encompassed such a wide range, although a similar progression can be traced in the work of Charles Tomlinson and Donald Davie, who have both modified their careful and rigid technique with a new freedom of form and exactness of description while resident in the United States. Gunn, however, has gone much further with his experiments, and it is this openness to new poetic forms and subject matter that makes his work so valuable. It also, unfortunately, makes it difficult to precisely differ­ entiate the various influences on Gunn's poetry, for the qualities of his ^ * * !» » » early verse are transformed rather than abondonned in his more experimental work. The only constant factor in Gunn's work is his scrupulous intelligence and it is merely in the clear expression of this intelligence that Gunn has sometimes failed. Gunn's openness to such a wide range of experience has always been one of his most endearing characteristics, but it needs to be seen in the context of his career as a whole, and the specific influences that have been at work on it. Gunn was born in Gravesend on 29 August 1929, the son of Herbert Gunn (later a controversial editor of the Daily Sketch) and 'lived in London for most of an unhaphazard middle-class youth, while my family stealthily crept up from middle-middle class to upper-middle class' . He attended University College School in Hampstead until 1948 when he spent two years in the army on National Service 'without firing a shot in anger'. This was to provide the material for some of the poems in Fighting Terms, including 'Lofty in 2. the Palais de Danse* and 'Captain in time of peace', although at this time Gunn was writing fiction, not poetry. The effects perhaps went deeper, for Gunn later wrote that 'I do not deliberately belong to any school, but I suppose I am part of the National Service generation, and have some of its characteristics: lack of concern with religion, lack of class, a rather undirected impatience 1 2 . Gunn then spent six months in Paris, working on the Metro, before going up to Trinity College Cambridge, where he read English, in 1950. He had a brilliant career, taking a double first, becoming President of the University English Club, and working for a time on Granta. Gunn was a contemporary of John Mander and Frederick Grubb - both of whom were later to write about his work - and of Ted Hughes, although he did not know him closely, and was also a friend of the American poet Donald Hall, then a postgraduate at Oxford, where Gunn also had many contacts. More importantly, Gunn later wrote that it was at Cambridge 'that I started writing seriously for the first time. It was here that I wrote my first book' 3 . It was also at Cambridge that 'I quickly grew up after hearing that Edith Sitwell was a bad poet. It struck me that one poem was perhaps better than another, huge possibilities became apparent, and I stopped 4 wanting to imitate a lot of famous but mediocre writers' . The first result of this new interest in poetry was an anthology edited by Gunn, Poetry from Cambridge 1951-2 , published in 1953, and his reputation was /: consolidated by the publication of a Fantasy Press pamphlet of his poetry later in the same year. In 1954, just after Gunn had completed his studies, the same press published his first collection, Fighting Terms , and Gunn's reputation was assured. In some ways, the rest of his career can be seen as an attempt to escape the precocity of this early verse, both in technique and subject matter. During this time, Gunn was contributing some poetry and criticism to the newly founded London Magazine, including an interesting account of life Q at Cambridge . He had applied for a scholarship to Yale, but was unsuccess- 3. ful, and spent some time in Rome, on a studentship, working on his second book. Donald Hall had advised Gunn to apply to Stanford University, situated across the Bay from San Francisco, and in the autumn of 1954 he was awarded a scholarship there to study under Yvor Winters. Apart from occasional visits to England and a three month stay in Berlin, Gunn has lived in America ever since. The influence of Winters has been crucial, although Gunn did not know anything about him when he applied to Stanford - 'It was an inter­ esting confrontation. I found him a very impressive man and I spent about the first three months arguing with him all the time. I think he has been good for me in many ways 1 g . Gunn was to acknowledge this debt in the poem w,v,*w' To Yvor Winters 1956', and it was in Winfeor^a seminar class that Donald Hall began his experiments with syllabics, a form in which he, Gunn, and Alan Stephens, all pupils of Winters, were later to write ie& extensively. Winters describes these experiments in Forms of Discovery , although, paradoxically, he is sceptical about the results. Gunn remained at Stanford until 1958, studying and lecturing on English literature, although he spent some time teaching in San Antonio in Texas. During this time he wrote the rest of the poems that were to form The Sense of Movement, and seven of these were previewed in New Lines , which appeared in 1956. Through this Gunn was unwittingly associated with 'The Movement', although he was geographically and temperamentally remote from this controversy, and later denied his membership of any such group. 'The big joke about the Movement was that none of the people had ever met each other and certainly never subscribed to anything like a programme. There 12 were a few chance resemblances, but they were pretty chance' . It is nevertheless true that this anthology brought Gunn's poetry to a wider audience, although at the price of distorting his aims and affinities (as had earlier happened with his inclusion as a 'neo-Empsonian' in the 13 Springtime anthology in 1953). Gunn was, in fact, becoming more involved in the American than the English literary scene, writing for the Yale Review 4. and Poetry Chicago, although he also continued to contribute to the London Magazine and the Spectator. His reputation was further enhanced by the publication of The Sense of Movement in 1957, which was awarded the Somerset Maugham award, and made a recommendation of the Poetry Book Society. In 1958, Gunn moved to Oakland, and took up a teaching post at Berkeley University, where he was appointed as Assistant Professor of English, a position he held until 1966. In the same year, Gunn revised Fighting Terms extensively for an American paperback edition , and began to experiment extensively with syllables. In 1959 Gunn spent three months in Berlin with the proceeds of his Maugham award.