Thom Gunn

Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, England, on August 29, 1929, the older son of two journalists. His parents were divorced when he was ten years old, and his mother died by suicide while he was a teenager. Before her death, Gunn’s mother had inspired a deep love of reading in him, including affection for the writings of Christopher Marlowe, Keats, Milton, and Tennyson, as well as several prose writers.

Before enrolling at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1950, Gunn spent two years in the national service and six months in Paris. In 1954, the year after his graduation, Gunn’s first poetry collection, Fighting Terms was published in 1954, both by Fantasy Press in Oxford, England, and Hawk’s Well Press in the United States. The book was instantly embraced by several critics, including John Press, who wrote, “This is one of the few volumes of postwar verse that all serious readers of poetry need to possess and to study.” Gunn relocated to San Francisco and held a one-year fellowship at Stanford University, where he studied with Yvor Winters.

Over the next few decades, Gunn published numerous collections that were not as warmly received as his earliest work: The Passages of Joy (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983); Selected Poems 1950–1975 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979); Jack Straw’s Castle (Faber and Faber, 1976); To the Air (David R. Godine, 1974); Moly (Faber and Faber, 1971); Touch (Faber and Faber, 1967); My Sad Captains (Phoenix Books/University of Chicago Press, 1961); and The Sense of Movement (Faber and Faber, 1957), published by the University of Chicago Press in the U.S.

During the 1970s and 1980s, Gunn’s poems were marked by the poet’s personal experiences, as he wrote more openly about his homosexuality and drug use. Many critics believed he was betraying his talents. But with the publication of The Man with Night Sweats (Faber and Faber, 1992), a collection memorializing his friends and loved ones who had fallen victim to the AIDS pandemic, critics were reminded of Gunn’s early promise. As writer Neil Powell said of the book, “Gunn restores poetry to a centrality it has often seemed close to losing, by dealing in the context of a specific human catastrophe with the great themes of life and death, coherently, intelligently, memorably. One could hardly ask for more.” He received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the collection in 1993.

Gunn went on to publish several more books of poetry in both the U.S. and Britain, including Boss Cupid (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2000); the limited-edition Frontiers of Gossip (Robert L. Barth, 1998); and Collected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994). He also published several collections of essays, including The Occasions of Poetry (Faber and Faber, 1982), released in the U.S. in 1999.

Gunn’s honors include the Levinson Prize, an Arts Council of Great Britain Award, a Rockefeller Award, the W. H. Smith Award, the PEN (Los Angeles) Prize for Poetry, the Sara Teasdale Prize, a Lila Wallace–Reader’s Digest Award, the Forward Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.

Thom Gunn died on April 25, 2004, in his home in San Francisco.