In the 1950's when his generation of poets emerged, he was immediately regarded as among its leading figures but whereas Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes have survived considerable vilification to become often quoted 'National Treasure' and iconic mythmaker respectively, Gunn has somewhat faded from view as the fashion has swung in some places towards a smartalec postmodernism in the Age of Muldoon. This is diagnosed by some commentators as being at least in part due to Gunn becoming transatlantic, if not American by adoption, and an accompanying stylistic shift in his poetry. But previously Donald Davie, in a critique of the period, had written that he kept noticing "how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre stage." Not that Gunn, despite his apparent swagger, seems the sort of person to 'shoulder' his way anywhere, it was the poems that did that. Those poems, though, have always been more urbane than those of Hughes and if there are some residual similarities in method to Larkin's, Gunn's came to express a much more generous personality than Larkin's cartoon curmudgeon.
As befits such a contrast, Larkin was more frugal and his three mature volumes constitute a 'selected poems' with the removal of only a handful of pieces whereas Gunn's output does benefit from some pruning. Not necessarily at the hands of his last editor, August Kleinzahler, or perhaps Clive Wilmer, though, despite the impressive credentials they bring to the job. I was ready to complain, in time honoured tradition, about the omission of a number of poems - A Waking Dream, Thomas Bewick, Monterey and The Butcher's Son - for which Wilmer includes sufficient candidates fit for substitution, but then checked Kleinzahler's volume and found he doesn't include any of them either. Whether this is down to their attempts to represent the range of Gunn's output rather than present his finest work or if we merely diverge in our tastes is a question I'm left with but I can't agree with the selection.
Wilmer puts in the whole of the long poems Misanthropos and Jack Straw's Castle while Kleinzahler leaves them out and certainly both decisions are preferable to using only excerpts from either but even if they are thematically significant, it would free up a lot of space for less dubious work if they were regarded as interesting, less successful experiments and didn't diminish the selection which might become the one that future readers first turn to. Poets deserve to be assessed by their best work rather than a representative sample that demonstrates acknowledged flaws and Gunn in his finest moments is a more accomplished poet than any of his generation.
Where Kleinzahler saw the first two collections, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement, as juvenilia, Wilmer spreads his selection more evenly throughout a career that moved through very different phases but produced masterpieces from the outset to the end, an end that Wilmer tells us was almost pre-conceived, but emphasizes, if anything, the poet that Gunn became ahead of the knowing coolness that first made his name and it would be difficult to omit any more than he has done from The Man with Night Sweats, which is regarded as a return to form even by many who ever thought Gunn had lost something. It is clear by now that he never had. If those of us that grew up with the David Bowie of the 1970's might now think that his shifts in genre eventually didn't do him any favours and ran into something less than genius, Thom Gunn never lost the capacity to provide each new collection with poems to compare with his best.
Wilmer tells us that Gunn 'came to dislike' The Sense of Movement for '(as he saw it) its excessive formality and over-deliberate manner'. And one well might, having moved on, but Gunn was a good enough judge of his own work to regard the poem My Sad Captains as 'one of his best poems'. It would have been a shame not to. But what he perhaps didn't realize, following his reservations about the 'confessional' poetry of Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, was that somewhere inside him was a confessional poet trying to get out from the model of impersonal detachment that he long maintained. If we can read into the trajectory of his oeuvre as a whole an emerging frankness about his homosexuality (which for me is neither here nor there in an appreciation of his talent or significance as a poet) as the zeitgeist modified itself as he wrote, we can also now see his devotion to his mother, who committed suicide at a crucial time in his life, and hostile attitude to his difficult father not only in the later poems where he finally recalled his teenage years but also in From an Asian Tent, left uncollected at the time of writing, in which, he
each year look more like the man I least
Choose to resemble, bully, drunk, and beast.
Are you a warning, Father, or an example?
If that is a minor paradox, it is a more regular succession of paradoxes that Gunn makes his poems from, as if echoing Keats' idea of 'negative capability',
that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason
something like which is to be found in On the Move,
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
and in other poems both in this selection and not in it.
We shouldn't make quite so much of the points that Gunn was poetry's most sophisticated contribution to the 1960's counter-culture of The Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane et al while maintaining a much longer tradition that acknowledged John Donne and Elizabethan poets as models, or that he was equally adept at metrical, syllabic and free verse, each informing the other, if occasionally to his detriment when too enamoured with the Roberts Duncan and Creeley, which isn't to say that his interest in them didn't contribute something to his writing.
It is to be hoped that Clive Wilmer's work in making this selection offers a chance for Gunn to be re-assessed and his status in literary history established somewhere above where it could have been left to languish, as a poet's poet but not considered foremost among the generations of poets coming after those of us who took their initial impetus from the poetry of the 1950's. It was Thom Gunn that made me want to be a poet in the same way that George Best made me want to be a footballer although it's a moot point which influence was the most significant or useful. I had understood that a biography was in preparation but that was a few years ago now and there's no sign of it so maybe that project has been abandoned but let's hope it hasn't and its author hasn't long forgotten it and used their Eng Lit Masters to gain a position in marketing or advertising.
I am grateful to Clive Wilmer and August Kleinzahler who 'keep hope alive' even though I remain at some odds with their choices of what constitutes Gunn's best work. In the best way, it is an oeuvre that was at once contemporary and for all time but when his two nominated literary executors fail to include The Butcher's Son in their definitive selections, one wonders if they didn't quite appreciate,
a light within the light
That he turned everywhere.
