Thom Gunn Obituary

This obituary first appeared on the website of The Reader in 2004,

Thom Gunn (1929-2004)

Thom Gunn died on Sunday 25 April in San Francisco.

One of the more obvious things to say would be that it’s impossible to imagine that a poet who celebrated the joy and thrills of being alive so eruditely is really dead. Even at 74, Gunn’s associations with youth and counter-culture made him seem unlike someone who was growing old. It is often an artist’s early work that defines them and the poems from the 1950’s about Elvis Presley and motor bikers seemed to define him as eternally young, turning ‘revolt into a style’. Certainly Gunn was interested in the superficiality of ‘cool’ but it was the formal, controlled and elegant (‘metaphysical’, apparently) way that he expressed his involvement with it that made him a genuinely ‘cool’ figure himself.
Along with Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes, he was one of the three major English poets that emerged in the 50’s. At first his poems were compared with Hughes’ for their interest in energy and even violence and with Larkin’s for their formal structures which seemed to suggest he was a part of the much-discussed ‘Movement’. As is the case with many of these generalisations, very little of it proved to be lasting or relevant. Gunn moved to San Francisco and became a trans-Atlantic writer, teaching at Berkeley University and more interesting for his differences to Larkin and Hughes than his similarities.
The poet and critic Donald Davie, writing in Under Briggflatts, his book on the poetry of the second half of the twentieth century, wrote that

as I put it together I was surprised how insistently Thom Gunn shouldered to centre stage.

Not being exactly the household-name poet like Betjeman or Larkin, Thom Gunn was, in that stilted phrase, a poet’s poet.
The development of Gunn’s theme was in a way, one big process- from the inward-looking, philosophical edginess of Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement finding separateness and the definition of limits everywhere to an opening out in Touch and beyond where he celebrates a shared humanity and escapes the ‘patina of self’. Having immersed himself in a network of human and natural relationships in poems The Geysers and The Discovery of the Pacific, it was tragically the AIDS virus that took away many of his friends in the early 90’s which he wrote of and received much acclaim for in The Man with Night Sweats.
At the same time, his poems moved from strictly-organized, formal rhyme schemes to syllabic and free verse. He was one of the few examples of C20th poets whose work you could confidently point to and show that poetry didn’t have to rhyme.
His last book, Boss Cupid (2000), was partly anecdotal and thus as uneven as some of his earlier books had been said to be. Nobody publishes perfect poems all the time. But it contained several memorable, humane and celebratory pieces, not least of which among them was The Butcher’s Son, a memory of his childhood in the 1939-45 war and The Gas Poker about his Mother's early suicide. They were among the best poems he wrote.