SOURCE: "Definition and Flow: Thorn Gunn in the 1970s," in British Poetry Since 1970: A Critical Survey, edited by Peter Jones and Michael Schmidt, Persea Books, 1980, pp. 64-74.

Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains, first published in 1961, has two sections quite distinct in character, the first consisting of poems in traditional metres, the second of apparently lighter pieces in syllabic verse. Gunn has since renounced syllabics in favour of free verse, but his publications still require the reader to accept that metrical poems are different in kind from poems in 'open' forms. D.H. Lawrence, in the Preface to the American edition of his New Poems (an essay whose influence Gunn has acknowledged), arguing the case for such a distinction, wrote of free verse as pre-eminently the medium of presenttense meditation, of perception in the process of taking form. By contrast—so he argued—the great stanzaic poems deal with ends and beginnings, past and future:

It is in the realm of all that is perfect. It is of the nature of all that is complete and consummate. This completeness, this consummateness, the finality and the perfection are conveyed in exquisite form: the perfect symmetry, the rhythm which returns upon itself like a dance where the hands link and loosen and link for the supreme moment of the end."… But there is another kind of poetry: the poetry of that which is at hand: the immediate present. In the immediate present there is no perfection, no consummation, nothing finished. The strands are all flying, quivering, intermingling into the web, the waters are shaking the moon. There is no round consummate moon on the face of running water, nor on the face of the unfinished tide.

Though Gunn's poetry is hardly dance-like, it certainly used to be remarkable for rhythms returning upon themselves, for the finality of its meditations; yet at the same time what did it celebrate but flux, risk, the unpredictable future, the unfinished artefact? Although much of its interest lay in the tension between form and content, one is hardly surprised to learn that Gunn has come increasingly to admire a poetry which possesses the very qualities that move him in life. All that the poetry of Whitman and Lawrence, Williams and Snyder must have lacked to so skilled and deliberate an artificer was a sense of the necessary and inevitable artificiality of poetry, the supreme fiction.

When Gunn finally discarded the somewhat arbitrary discipline of syllabic verse in the mid-sixties, it was mainly to William Carlos Williams that he turned for a model of free-verse prosody: the right choice, surely, for few modern poets have combined Williams's level of craftsmanship with such apparent informality. Now, ten years later, in Jack Straw's Castle (1976), the relationship between Gunn's two modes is becoming clearer. In the metrical poems the rhythms are looser, the language more conversational, the structures based more on sequences of perception than on patterns of logical thought. The free verse gains in authenticity from Gunn's sense of how a poem is made and how its making must relate to what already exists in the world. A sense of the limits of both flux and artifice is built into the poetry. Lawrence was original in his insistence that the two kinds of prosody fulfil different functions and must therefore continue to co-exist. Metre will still be called upon to embody the products of concentrated thought, to give the semblance of immutable form to (relatively) immutable verities. For this it depends on an element of predictability in its movement. Free verse, however—if it is wholly distinct from metre, as Lawrence's is and Williams's—depends on the opposite, on our inability to predict the rhythmic outcome. Gunn, like Williams, plays on this, tantalizing the reader with weak line-endings and long sinuous sentences broken into short lines. This procedure emphasises the overall rhythm (as against the line-as-unit) and suggests the hesitancy of the human voice as it shapes its utterances. The poem seems to discover its meanings as it proceeds, as if it were a sequence of thought enacted before us, affected by the moment: we seem to acquire a new awareness of thought (and poem) as process. This method—exemplified by a poem as early as 'Touch', published in 1967—enables Gunn not only to describe the world, but at the same time to dramatize the ways in which we come to know it, in terms which point ultimately to his own beliefs about its nature.

But there is nothing especially new about such discoveries. On the contrary, they are based on ideas associated with the adolescence of the modern movement. Their importance for us lies in the fact that Gunn, as a poet once associated with quite different attitudes to the function of poetry, has rediscovered them for himself. When he wrote My Sad Captains, Gunn was virtually a disciple of that implacable anti-Modernist, Yvor Winters, whose continuing influence on him has been considerable. Yet Gunn today can write of Ezra Pound as 'probably the greatest poet we have had in this century'; and any poet who turns to Williams as a model must ultimately come to terms with a Poundian view of literature.

Winters, a classicist and neo-humanist in the Jonsonian mould, held that a good poem was a rational structure composed of connected propositions, to which form was the objective equivalent. As such, he rejected the irrationalist assumptions of Modernist poetics as firmly as the Right-wing politics associated with its founders. For politically Winters was the most redoubtable of liberals. He held that political and literary irrationalism make men the victims of their history and experience. Poetry was only of value if its end was understanding; the poem was not a kind of secondary organism that partakes of life, but a skilfully contrived artefact set apart from the flux it seeks to evaluate. But Winters's view of understanding itself often seems excessively restricted; he always considers it in terms of completed perceptions and achieved ideas. For Gunn, ideas and understanding are more closely entwined in the process of language. He has written of Gary Snyder that 'like most serious poets he is mainly concerned at finding himself on a barely known planet in an almost unknown universe, where he must attempt to create and discover meanings. Discovery of a meaning is always also the creation of it, and creation is an act of discovery.' Then, of one specific poem, 'it is. … a series of pictorial perceptions made by a man embedded in time, who advances into the sensory world opened by his waking'. This conception of poetry and the terms Gunn uses are largely dependent on Winters's example. What he adds is a greater respect for the force of sensuous and instinctual awareness.

Gunn would now probably agree with Donald Davie who, in a recent study of Pound, takes issue with Winters's view of the Cantos but finds his objections to them illuminating. Winters, he writes,

conceiving of an idea as that which could be stated in the form of a proposition, recorded his experience of reading the Cantos by saying, 'we have no way of knowing whether we have had any ideas or not'."… if we take account of what he understood 'idea' to be, Winters' remark is one of the few valuably exact formulations that we have of what reading the Cantos amounts to, and feels like.

For Pound an idea was not a proposition but 'The forma, the immortal concetto' which Allen Upward had described in these words: 'The idea is not the appearance of a thing already there, but rather the imagination of a thing not yet there. It is not the look of a thing, it is a looking forward to a thing'.

Gunn rejects Wintersian 'propositions' in favour of something rather like Pound's forma in a poem called 'The Outdoor Concert'. The title is a play on words: the 'concert' is both a musical performance and an experience of unity. The poem describes a 'secret' at the heart of a shared experience, a kind of synthesis. The act of discovery is not a lonely quest but the participation of one man in a group.

The secret
is still the secret

is not a proposition:
it's in finding
what connects the man
with the music, with
the listeners, with the fog
in the top of the eucalyptus,
with dust discovered on the lip.

A proposition will not embrace the multiplicity of experience—nor indeed will any formulation—but to perceive connections is also a form of understanding. The poem constructs a web—an organic image which, since the poem is in free verse, may remind us of Lawrence. In more mechanical terms we might call it a diagram. Jack Straw's Castle does in fact contain a poem called 'Diagrams', which is written in strict heroic couplets and, with fourteen lines, recalls that most elaborately artificial of forms, the sonnet. We can now perceive how Gunn's preoccupation with reason and volitional form has developed. He is now concerned with 'models' of thought—as Poundian an interest as it is Wintersian, for what are Pound's ideograms but models, the matrices on which ideas are formed?

The ideogram in Pound's theory, though related to rhythm, is primarily a matter of content, of images and ideas. It was of no interest to Winters. And I doubt that Winters's scrupulous distinctions between metre ('the arithmetical norm, the purely theoretic structure of the line') and rhythm ('controlled departure from that norm') would have appealed to Pound. But both conceptions are of relevance to Gunn (and to many more of us). His own conception of metre remains as mathematical as Winters's; metre is, he has written, 'an unbodied abstraction', then goes on, like Winters, to emphasize that the life of a poem depends on it. For Gunn and Winters, all structures, whether of language or society, are frameworks which sustain a life, though—of their very nature—quite separate from it.

When we read Pound, however, we experience an attempt to push the artefact as close to the given world as it will go. The rhythms of speech are attuned to those of nature. The very structure of the Cantos is fragmentary, as if they had been worn down by the wind and water whose acts of erosion they so insistently and delectably evoke. Yet no reader could ever pretend that the hand and mind of the artificer seemed absent from the enterprise, whatever its aspirations or shortcomings. Moreover, though the overall structure of the work may appear loose, the individual details are remarkable for their hardness and definition. It must have been tensions of this sort that first made Pound's poetry available to Gunn.

Of the book that preceded Jack Straw's Castle Gunn has written—in language that might have been used to register his admiration for Pound—that 'It could be seen as a debate between the passion for definition and the passion for flow."… Yet that book, Moly (1971), seemed to mark a retreat from the open forms he had developed in Touch (1967). The passion for definition is most in evidence in the elegant formality of the rhymed stanzas; that for flow in the varieties of energy they contemplate. But 'the sense of movement', of energy, has changed. Gone are the uniformed heroes for whom the will 'cannot submit/To nature, though brought out of it.' In their place are the surfers of 'From the Wave'. Though, like the tearaways of 'On the Move', they become what they are through movement, they do so by adapting themselves to nature. Their skill and balance enable them to act in concord with the waves—and these are qualities which require a harmony between knowledge and instinct, consciousness and action.

The debate to which Gunn referred is continued in the group of metrical poems that make up the first section of Jack Straw's Castle. The free verse poems in the other two sections approach similar problems from a different angle; there definition is arrived at, not imposed. 'The Plunge' tries in its language to enact the process of acquiring knowledge by total immersion. A diver plunges into a pool and stays under till he can take no more, till he reaches the limits of the self. This discovery of limits is a discovery of definition, of essential form. 'How much more can the body / take?' he asks, driving himself to the point where process must stop and formulation begin. For 'Thomas Bewick', immersion in the detail of the natural world is like a return to the womb. The umbilical cord that binds him to the rest of the material universe not yet cut, he is conscious but not yet individual.

Immersion in process reaches its limit in a new kind of permanence—the book for which Bewick's name is remembered, capitalized and visually set apart from the rest of the poem. The rhythm enacts the flow of experience into record.

If such poems are necessarily composed in open form, how do they differ from those written in traditional prosody? What Gunn has discovered through free verse has inevitably affected his standard metre, sometimes to its detriment. His attempts at the conversational can be banal: 'More meteors than I've ever set eyes on' for example. Or rhythmically confusing: the line, 'It doesn't matter tomorrow. Sleep well. Heaven knows', is only theoretically a pentameter; it is impossible to hear five feet, iambic or otherwise. But just at the edge of clumsiness, there are some felicitous variations, as in a mimetic view of a watersnake: 'I see a little snake alert in its skin/Striped head and neck from water, unmoving, reared'. The precariousness of such failures and successes is part of the whole debate between flux and definition, the intrusion of 'natural' rhythms into the fixities of traditional prosody.

The debate is initiated by the first three poems in Jack Straw's Castle. One of these, 'Diagrams', explores the illusion of permanence and the containment of flux. A skyscraper is being built. In its unfinished state it resembles a mesa, as if it were not an artefact at all but a permanent feature of the landscape. To the European reader, both mesa and skyscraper evoke the American landscape; this is important, for Gunn, though English by birth, is now deeply concerned with the United States as a political and geographical entity. Significantly, the men at work on the steel mesa are aboriginal Americans:

On girders round them, Indians pad like cats,
With wrenches in their pockets and hard hats.

Their agility expresses their closeness to the environment, mesa or skyscraper. The human embodiment of American 'nature', they are engaged in creating the human contribution to that landscape. They are the presiding deities of Jack Straw's Castle, moving like animals among provisional human artefacts, yet equally at home in the given world. Gunn shows them poised between permanence and flux, rather as a Renaissance poet might show man poised between earth and air:

They wear their yellow boots like moccasins,
Balanced where air ends and where steel begins,
Sky men."…

Their boots—products of industrial society, used for work among that society's structures—are worn like the shoes they would wear on a real mesa. The building they are erecting, though intended as a fixed and stable thing, appears as it grows to absorb and transform the energies that surround it. It becomes a 'giant' that 'grunts and sways', rising into the air: 'And giving to the air is sign of strength.' As in 'From the Wave', to bend to the power of the elements is to derive strength from them. But the ordinary meaning of 'give' is also present: the building appears to seep energy into the air. The contrast with the solitary heroes to whom Gunn bade farewell in 'My Sad Captains' could not be greater:

The consumption of their energy was magnificent but, ultimately, waste. For Gunn today, the transformation of energy is 'sign of strength', the adaptation of self to environment.

The diagrams of the title are cranes and exposed girders, but I take it that Gunn is also thinking of other structures that bear upon the poem's meaning—notably, the grid of its own metre. And most of these recent metrical poems are concerned with moments in which fluidity takes on permanent form. Such permanence is illusory but necessary. American permanence, in a political sense, is embodied in its constitution, which itself has its origin in revolutionary change. Gunn is not a political poet in the sense of being 'committed'—he is primarily concerned with identities and relations we think of as pre-political, with 'finding himself on a barely known planet in an almost unknown universe'. But as Camus (one of his most honoured heroes) discovered, freedom and choice do not exist in abstract purity; once a man is oppressed, he discovers his political nature whether he will or no. It was under Camus's influence, in My Sad Captains, that Gunn first tried to show how the individual's choices may operate in society. Like Camus, he was thinking of an extreme kind of society, though, unlike him, he had not lived in one. The political positions adopted are therefore limited in application, though quite clear: specifically anti-fascist, broadly anti-totalitarian. The rational individualism of 'Claus von Stauffenberg, 1944' might be called liberal. It is strange to recall that Gunn's early poems were often accused of fascism—especially in the light of his recent testimony that as an undergraduate (when he wrote Fighting Terms) he was a pacifist and a Fabian socialist. The violence of those poems is examined outside a social context and not proposed as a good. The dissolution of self in the group and the adoption of various 'uniforms' are choices made voluntarily by individuals. The heroic stance is precisely that: a stance, a posture by which a man defines his identity: it is frozen action, the fluid given the appearance of permanence. If Gunn seemed obsessed with Nazism—its history, postures and regalia—this has something to do with growing up in time of war and reaching manhood when the struggle was over. Not having fought in that war is the context a recent poem like 'The Corporal' requires. So, in My Sad Captains and Touch, Gunn criticizes his earlier stances in such a way as to acquit himself of this accusation. Since Touch, his politics have become decidedly American. It is possible to read the Arcadian world of Moly as a new version of the American dream—the New World as the second Eden. But such an Arcadia must become mere escapism in the years of the Vietnam war and Nixon's presidency, if actual political issues are not faced. Jack Straw's Castle is the only book of Gunn's which shows the need to deal with contemporary history. 'Nixon's era', with its corruption and rigidity, is regarded as a betrayal of the system of institutionalized change on which the United States was founded. 'Iron Landscapes', the one poem to deal directly with these issues, is brilliantly written, but flawed and problematic.

It is a meditation on an antiquated iron pier and a girdered ferry-building beside the Hudson River. Gunn's newly-acquired modernism is in evidence, not least in the rhythmic flexibility.

A girdered ferry-building opposite,
Displaying the name LACKAWANNA, seems to ride

The turbulent brown-grey waters that intervene:
Cool seething incompletion that I love.

In these lines, the iambic pentameter is the norm from which the rhythm departs. The first and fourth lines are regular. The other two depart from that pattern, much as the non-verbal facts they attempt to encompass elude verbal formulation. In the first of these, the capitalized name (does this too have Indian associations?) fits so awkwardly into the line that the hard physical intractability of the other artefact comes alive to us. (Gunn's admiration for similar rhythmic and verbal angularities in Thomas Hardy comes to mind: 'They present things with immediate authority.') Variation in the third line achieves a different effect: we feel the elusive fluidity of the perception by contrast with the formulaic precision of the regular line that follows. Regularity, of course, is appropriate to commentary, to formulations necessarily of the mind.

It is not just a matter of rhythm. Free verse enacts a different kind of thought and thinking. If we look at some of Gunn's best early poems—at 'Innocence' or 'The Annihilation of Nothing'—we are struck not only by the exactness of the metre (in contrast with the awkwardness of 'Iron Landscapes') but, more, by the perfection of the argument. Too perfect, you might think, too coherent to allow for the fluidities, the innate contradictions of the subject. Life is almost imprisoned by the subject, not enlarged. But in this poem we are able to follow the poet's train of thought as the different elements that compose the argument are brought together. It is not, as in the free verse, a poetry of process. The different elements have been prefabricated, as it were, into blocks. Our attention is drawn less to thought-as-process than to the way experience is shaped into form and formula, to become idea, concept, belief, opinion.

The poem begins with the 'bare black Z' of the pier and the poet beneath it, looking across the river to the ferry-building. The zigzags of the iron structures 'come and go' in the water, become fluid in the water's reflection of them. Separate perceptions are brought together, not by volition but by contingency. This provokes the central paradox, the conflict between Gunn's passions for definition and for flow. Then a third perception comes into play. Glimpsed downstream, the Statue of Liberty provokes reflections on the present state of the nation. Gunn has just declared his 'passion for definition', having earlier declared his love for its opposite, 'Cool seething incompletion'.

But I'm at peace with the iron landscape too,
Hard because buildings must be hard to last
—Block, cylinder, cube, built with their angles true,
A dream of righteous permanence, from the past.

In Nixon's era, decades after the ferry,
The copper embodiment of the pieties
Seems hard, but hard like a revolutionary
With indignation, constant as she is.

From here you can glimpse her downstream, her far charm,
Liberty, tiny woman in the mist
—You cannot see the torch—raising her arm
Lorn, bold, as if saluting with her fist.

Thus from stability and flux, iron and water, the poem moves on to an historical plane: the rigidity of reactionary government is now set against the principle of change on which the Constitution is founded. First, the identification of buildings with institutions is made; the dream from the past is, among other things, the dream of the original revolutionaries whose Utopia is embodied in another metal artefact, the statue. The difficulty is that they created their liberal revolution in the image of the old order: they tried to institutionalize change. Today's revolutionaries aspire to base new societies on change, but their weakness (implicit here or not?) is their failure to recognize the human need for fixities. The poem ends with an image of the old revolution (the statue) transformed into the new (the clenched-fist salute), and 'Liberty' is neither permanent nor fluctuating but constant, a principle existing in time with changing manifestations, itself unchanging.

Inevitably writing of this sort raises questions. After all, these are matters we argue vehemently about, yet the poem—though it appears to take sides—is an unresolved embodiment of the issues. This is a case where we need Wintersian propositions but are left with a web of gestures, even of prejudices. For example, the poem depends on the assumption (which I happen to share) that the Nixon era was a bad time; but this is something we need to be persuaded of. A similar doubt infects the poem's technique. Is Gunn being relaxed and flexible, or merely clumsy? Does the rhyme 'ferry'/'revolutionary' work? Yet the rhythmical counterpoint in the last stanza is as beautiful and assured as anything in Gunn's work. His gaucheries sometimes seem Hardyesque authentications of his honesty; here he is most fluent where difficulties need to be raised, where the thought should meet with most resistance from the verse. It is a convincing conclusion to a line of thought but, finally, no more than a gesture—and it is a good many years now since Gunn first questioned the validity of 'the large gesture of solitary man'. In his earlier work, stance, pose and gesture were important as moments of stasis through which people established their identities, breaking temporarily free from 'movement'. Moreover, these stances, though they involved commitment to action, did not involve action in terms of the stance. The fetishistic dandy with the swastika-draped bed in 'The Beaters' is in no sense a Nazi. But in 'Iron Landscapes', the emotion compels us to identify with a pose which is intended to issue in specific actions with public implications and, however much one may sympathize with such a response to the Nixon era, one must ask what essential difference there is between the clenched fist and a Naz I salute. True, one is a gesture of resistance, the other of oppression. But both are salutes; both call for public violence; both deny the validity of rational discussion. Of course, it is not Gunn's purpose to declare a commitment or to invoke the detail of political argument. It is a fine poem, and not the least of its virtues is that it is able to provoke such questions and to show historical patterns growing from the matrices of feeling the landscape represents. It shows American society as necessarily based on the dialectic of permanence and change, the very dialectic which determines the creative tensions of Gunn's poetry.

We have reached a stalemate: one though, as it seems to me, that is at the root of modern poetry. 'Iron Landscapes' attempts a reconciliation between the fluidity of the modern (free verse and all that goes with it) and the monumental qualities of the classical (the metred stanza). Whatever one makes of the metric, it should be clear that the internal structure is Modernist, almost Poundian; for it is concerned not with ideas but with the raw material of thought. It is significant that the internal structure resolves itself in a gesture: which is precisely the weakness of much of Pound's poetry. But what Gunn brings to this new Modernism is respect for the classical as a living concern. Whatever we make of the clenched fist, there is no mistaking the fundamentally liberal position of 'Iron Landscapes', a position reinforced by, for example, his version of colonization in the sequence called 'The Geysers'. The Indian workers of 'Diagrams' belong to a race displaced and humbled by colonialism, yet—as 'The Geysers' shows—all human habitations are colonies. The perpetual challenge faced by the liberal is how to make such colonies humane, how to establish a fruitful harmony between man the artificer and man the creature. Gunn is a highly civilized artist—hence his continuing loyalty to the old forms. Despite his enthusiasm for the new, he does not welcome—as some writers whose names have been misleadingly linked with his appear to do—the collapse of our civilization. Rather he sees change and the capacity for change as the essential qualities of a living civilization, and so celebrates its continuity.