The Gunn book was supposed to be something to do once I finish full-time work but I've got no more idea when that will be than you have. I thought I'd make some notes by way of preparation and it starts to look as if I might be able to do it. There's surely plenty to say and there is enough biography and autobiography already in print to lift. I mean 'cite'. All it needs is organizing, which is the enjoyable bit; and then writing, which is the drudgery where it might falter.
But I itched to get a few words done and was taken with this idea of where to start. If the book is never completed, at least this note makes a minor contribution to Gunn Studies.
--
Tamer and Hawk, in Thom Gunn's first book of poems, Fighting Terms, published in 1954, is the early masterpiece.
Whereas Yeats's
falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
is a hawk symbolic of lost connection, dysfunction and resulting anarchy, in The Second Coming,
and Gerard Manley Hopkins's Windhover is,
this morning, morning's, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling underneath him steady air,
and dedicated To Christ our Lord, the wonder of nature being implicit evidence of the presence of God,
and Ted Hughes's first book, The Hawk in the Rain begins with the poem of that title before he continues in Lupercal with Hawk Roosting and its masterful bird with,
no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.
Gunn's hawk is joined to its tamer in a symbiotic relationship of mutual control and sensual, limited freedom.
It was unfortunate that Gunn and Hughes were published together in the joint Selected Poems by Faber in 1962 because it led them to be inappropriately bracketed together on account of perceived themes of machismo and violence. Had Philip Larkin been included in a three-way Selected, which proved not possible due to Larkin's copyright agreement at the time, it might not have looked like that. It would have been more apparent that Gunn occupied a more central attitude between the 'gentility' in Larkin detected and derided by Al Alvarez in his introduction to The New Poetry, also from 1962, and the 'risk-taking' of Hughes that he so admired. It was Hughes that knew the difference and later pointed out that Gunn was 'a poet of gentleness'.
--
So that's 284 words. Including quotes. It took some checking to make sure it's right because it has to be because if you get one thing wrong, somebody will find it. In other people's books, that might be me. And it might not even be right and I'm not sure where the Hughes quote first appeared.
It could be a long job but the days will need filling with some sort of job.