Gunn, Thom(son) (Vol. 6) - Gunn, Thom(son) 1929–
Gunn, Thom(son) 1929–
An English poet now living in the United States, Gunn has said that he was influenced by seventeenth-century metaphysical poets and by his experience with LSD. (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 17-20, rev. ed.)
Much of Gunn's strength comes from his preparedness to try and make honest poetry out of his reflections on interpersonal experience. The results of this are often coarse and unprofound, and Gunn's evident embarrassment at some of the more basic kinds of sexual discovery sometimes suggests a real limitation of sensibility. But this in turn seems to be reinforced by Gunn's crude poetic diction and clumsy reliance on traditional metres which deny natural speech-rhythms and encourage the side-step into declamation and poetic clowning. With his recent switch to syllabic forms (itself only a surface tactic, of course, and no real solution) Gunn has evaded this particular problem, and in at least one of these later...
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