The New Criterion
America’s leading review of the arts and intellectual life
- Harry Mount, the London Telegraph
NotebookNovember 2004 Thom Gunn, 1929-2004 by Paul Dean On the passing of Thom Gunn, a poet who welcomed “Eliot’s ideal of ‘impersonality’ and scorning ‘confessional’ poetry as well as overmuch theory.” Leaving aside the fact that there will always be some who disapprove of Thom Gunn on principle, it would be easy to read his life and career as a cautionary tale: the young poet of prodigious assurance and power, a modern Metaphysical, who squandered his gifts on the hippydom of 1960s California, slackened his line, coarsened his feelings, and banalized his diction. Those who think this might concede that his elegies to AIDS victims in the early 1990s marked a partial return to form, followed by the unevenness of his last volume, Boss Cupid (2000). Not surprisingly, Gunn did not see things that way. For him, the much-admired early poem “On the Move” exhibited an excessive formality and abstraction, as well as a kind of posing, from which he later sought to break free. The poems—many, ironically, in strict meter—that he wrote under the influence of drugs gave him the courage to ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 23 November 2004, on page 78 Copyright © 2012 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Thom-Gunn--1929-2004-1168
rate this article for your user profile
E-mail to friend
|
view more >
Webcasts
Anthony Daniels on the Euro Crisis
Andrew C. McCarthy: The Muslim Threat
Roger Kimball: The Grim Future of Statism Weblog 
|
add a comment
you must have an account to post a comment. {register now}