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The Poetry of Thom Gunn

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The Poetry of Thom Gunn The Poetry of Thom Gunn This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. ALSO BY STEFANIA MICHELUCCI AND FROM MCFARLAND Space and Place in the Works of D.H. Lawrence (2002) This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. The Poetry of Thom Gunn A Critical Study STEFANIA MICHELUCCI Translated by Jill Franks Foreword by Clive Wilmer McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. The book was originally published as La maschera, il corpo e l’an- ima: Saggio sulla poesia di Tho m Gunn by Edizioni Unicopli, Milano, 2006. It is here translated from the Italian by Jill Franks. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Michelucci, Stefania. [Maschera, il corpo e l'anima. English] The poetry of Thom Gunn : a critical study / Stefania Michelucci ; translated by Jill Franks ; foreword by Clive Wilmer. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-3687-3 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Gunn, Thom —Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR6013.U65Z7513 2009 821'.914—dc22 2008028812 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2009 Stefania Michelucci. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Cover photograph ©2008 Shutterstock Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 6¡¡, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. To my sons Jacopo and Mattias This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. We are tied to our bodies like an oyster to its shell —Plato This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. Acknowledgments First of all I would like to thank Thom Gunn, who in 1990 invited me to his home for an interview. This meeting provided new stimulus for my inter- est in his poetry. A very special thank you to Jill Franks for her kind offer to undertake the translation of this bo ok. I am d eeply indebted to her for the sensitivity, per- ception and clarity she displayed throughout. I am th ankful to G iovanni Cianci who en couraged me to exp and my research on Thom Gunn into a book, patiently following its course. His per- ceptive and sensitive comments, as well as his constant scholarly support, have been of great value to me. I owe a special recognition to Clive W ilmer for his availabilit y and gen- erosity, and for the scruples and patience with which he followed this project; his valuable suggestions were a great help. I am also deeply grateful that he was kind enough to write the Foreword to this book. I would like to thank Francesco Gozzi who, in the years of my university studies, wisely guided my research on contemporary poetry, and passed on his enthusiasm for the subject. Thanks to Lidia De Michelis, who patiently read this book; her advice and suggestions have always been valuable. I would also like to thank Bruno Gallo and Richard Ambrosini, who fol- lowed this project in its first phase and whose observations were a real help. Thanks to Giuseppe Sertoli for having read parts of this book. I am also grateful to Massimo Bacigalupo, Remo Ceserani, Martin Dods- worth, Elmar Schenkel, Peter Schwaab, Gregory Woods and John Worthen for the stimulating exchange of ideas which enriched my work. Finally I thank Michael Bell, Bethan Jones, Mike Kitay, August Kleinzahler, Wendy Lesser, Seán and Jessica Lysaght, Ronald Packham, Alessandra Petrina, Andrea Pinotti, Neil Roberts, Stan Smith and Luisa Villa for their help in many different ways. vii This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. Contents Acknowledgments vii Foreword by Clive Wilmer 1 Preface 5 Abbreviations 9 Introduction The Fifties 11 A Virtual “Movement” 12 Criticism and Poetry 15 The Canonization of the Movement 20 Thom Gunn and the Movement 22 I—“I’m an Anglo-American poet”: Profile of Thom Gunn Premise 25 Artistic Development 25 II—In Search of an Ubi Consistam Boasting Concealment: The Staging of Passion in the Early Collections 43 Between Tradition and Innovation 49 The Prison of the Intellect 51 Choosing Inertia 52 Action as Existential Absolute 54 III—A Challenge to the Void Heroes in Motion 59 Shaping the Fog 69 IV—Surrender and Recovery The Phenomenology of Defeat 81 The Twilight of Heroism 87 ix This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. x Contents From Senses to Sense 94 Contact 100 V—An Experiment in Artistic Collaboration Premise 109 Positives 110 VI—The Liberating Sixties Gay Pride 124 Rebirth 128 VII—The Body, Disease, and Death The Outsider 133 The Annihilation of Self 135 Regression to a Primal State 136 The Tortured Body 140 The Aging Body 143 The Dismembered Body 147 Thom Gunn Today 153 Appendix: Cole Street, San Francisco: A Conversation with Thom Gunn 159 Chapter Notes 175 Bibliography 199 Index 207 This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. Foreword by Clive Wilmer Like many readers of my generation, I first read Thom Gunn in 1962. That was the year of two celebrated anthologies: the Selected Poems of Thom Gunn and Ted Hughes, and A. Alvarez’s classic Penguin The New Poetry, in which the same two p oets were prominently featured. To a bo y of seventeen o bsessed with poetry, this new work came across with tremendous force and the fasci- nation of novelty. Here were two poets in their early thirties who spoke with the voices of a wholly new generation. In Gunn’s case it was partly a question of subject matter : his love of the modern city and pop music and adolescent rebellion. There was also his frankness about sex, desire, violence and restless- ness. Moreover, though I did not consciously register it then, I have always val- ued the absence from his work of an over-sensitive ego defending itself w ith irony. By contrast, there was so mething about both to ne and subject matter that struck me as heroic, despite the fact that the era we were living in was said to be unheroic. What was more, the heroism coincided with real emotions, as momentous as those in Donne or Shakespeare, but belonging to a world I rec- ognized as mine: a world overshadowed by the experience of the Second World War and the knowledge it had brought of our capacity for evil and self-destruc- tion as well as for courage and endurance. It was eventually to be important to me that, unconventional as his m orals were, Gunn was a profo undly ethical writer and that he was so in contexts that recognized the demands of our phys- ical nature. It was also important that his engagement with irrational forces was conducted in poems of elegant and traditional formality. Gunn is one of the great masters of English poetic form, both traditional and experimental, and, as a result, his best work has the power of a bomb about to go off: one is always conscious of intense passion, but a passion contained and directed by the dis- ciplines of language and versification. In his poem “To Yvor Winters” he praises a similarly powerful American poet for combining “Rule and Energy” in his verse. It was an aspiration he lived up to himself. Eight years before I first read him, Gunn had moved to the United States, 1 This pdf file is intended for review purposes only. 2 Foreword by Clive Wilmer where, without becoming an American citizen, he was to stay for the rest of his life. This was not at first a ch ange of much significance, but in time it was to separate him from much of his audience. He called himself “an Anglo-Amer- ican poet.” He began to use the odd Americanism, though he never really lost his British manner. He kept, for instance, his English love of reticence: his was the sort of poetry one associates with Wordsworth or Ben Jonson, in which the feeling and significance is often left entirely to implication. (It was this qual- ity that, in the 1980s, made his elegies for men who had died of AIDS so ver y moving.) But America changed the atmosphere of his p oems more than it changed their style. The tense Existentialist loneliness of his earlier work gave way to something more casual, an easy Californian hedonism, though his poems were seldom without their darknesses. When he combined this n ew-found optimism with free verse in the manner of William Carlos Williams—which, from the 1960s on, he did i ntermittently—he lost those rath er many British readers who are deaf to the music of American speech and seem to relish anx- iety in their poetry. As the 1960s turned into the ’70s, his restraint and dislike of self-expression began to look unfashionable, so that even when, in his 1975 collection Jack Straw’s Castle, he “came out” as a homosexual, it attracted lit- tle attention. The AIDS elegies, collected in The Man with Night Sweats (1992), restored something of his early fam e, but it was a fam e that often depended less on specific poems and their quality than on the news value of his subject and his “right on” attitudes. These were not reasons that appealed to him. Com- mitted to gay liberation, he was glad to contribute to wider understanding of homosexuality, but he never saw such things as the point of poetry.
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