[In the following essay, Powell determines the role of sexuality in Gunn's poetry.]

Though he will probably cringe at the thought, Thorn Gunn is the most distinguished living English gay poet, and after Auden the most significant English gay poet of the century. That's the sort of statement to make any poet cringe, which is why I want to get rid of it at the outset. It could all too easily seem to imply that writers can be sorted by sexuality into separate compartments, or that homosexual writers address a limited constituency of homosexual readers, neither of which must be the case. Gunn's sexuality matters to his readers partly because it has been, increasingly, a major theme in his work, and partly because his writing career spans and reflects a period of profoundly unsettling changes in the complex relationship between gay men and the rest of society.

Gunn is a poet who frequently revisits his past styles and refreshes himself with disparate influences, yet his work does roughly seem to divide into three phases or movements which I'll call containment, liberation, and openness. The first phase comprises the poems in Fighting Terms (1954), The Sense of Movement (1957), and part of My Sad Captains (1961). The superficial similarities between most of these poems are immediately apparent, and they concern characteristics which his early readers would readily have identified as Gunnish (thus, ironically, labelling and placing him in a way that the content of the poems is at pains to discourage): regular, iambic verse-forms; metaphysical abstraction overlaid with echoes of Yeats and Sartre; recklessly inspired combinations of historical and contemporary allusiveness.

Yet beneath these superficial characteristics run two obsessive, related themes: debates of the divided self, and the making of a personal iconography. Fighting Terms presents a procession of double consciousnesses or divided selves: Achilles and Lofty, ancient and modern soldiers wounded by memories which divide their actions from their thoughts; the brash exterior ("Even in bed I pose") and the hurt mind (" I saw that lack of love contaminates") in 'Carnal Knowledge'; the role-reversing tamer and hawk; the man in the snowy street looking up at his window and calling his own name in 'The Secret Sharer'; derelict present and edenic past in 'Looking Glass'; heroic action and introspective cunning in 'The Beach Head'; innocence instructed by experience in 'Incident on a Journey'; "submissive" Shelley and "masterful" Byron in 'Lerici'. And in two poems of this period, the homosexual dimension of this concept becomes explicit. One is 'Without a Counterpart', where the speaker wakes, frightened and apparently alone, to imagine a vast bleak landscape whose features—"Two reed-lined ponds", "a long volcano", "prickly turf"—gradually resolve into the eyes, mouth and stubble of a lover's face. In fact the poem does have a counterpart in 'Light Sleeping', which Gunn wrote in 1953 but excluded from Fighting Terms (it appears in The Missed Beat [1976]): two men are in bed; one wakes to a nightmare vision; but this time the other is awake and observes everything. Suddenly sitting bolt upright, he meditates on the moon and redefines the terms of Sidney's famous sonnet in Astrophil and Stella. He sees "a hell of love" as the cause of the moon's "sad steps", while Sidney's anguished question, "Do they above love to be loved, and yet / Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?" is answered by Gunn's vision of lovers "locked in each other's arms, / Cursed with content, pair by possessive pair": for Gunn, conventional love is by definition hellish because possessive, and the moon can only provide confirmation, not consolation.

'Light Sleeping' is in retrospect an important and revealing poem: Gunn was probably right to leave it out of Fighting Terms precisely because it appears to decode, and thus damagingly to limit, other poems in the book. The divided self is not, after all, an exclusively homosexual theme, but it is one of special significance for gay men, for whom the concepts of 'What I am' and 'What I want' are apt to blur and interchange. In his 'containment' phase, Gunn kept his sexuality fairly veiled to give the poems maximum universality—an entirely honourable stance, though probably not one which the gay poet in the late twentieth century can sustain for ever. The divided self poems offer one way of being truthful and evasive at the same time; the icon poems provide another.

Those in the know (to borrow Gunn's own phrase from his essay on Robert Duncan) would have had no difficulty in seeing what Gunn was up to in his second book, The Sense of Movement, but a sizeable number of readers must have assumed that, for example, the bikers in 'On the Move' were solely objects of identification rather than objects of desire, whereas much of the poem's energy derives from the fact that they are both. Similarly, in 'Elvis Presley', the rather implausible, wearily detached opening stance ("this one, in his gangling finery / And crawling sideburns") is soon complicated by hints of more subjective interest ("Our idiosyncrasy and our likeness", "posture for combat"). The Sense of Movement owes much of its effectiveness to the way in which Gunn's literary and philosophical ideas at this time were running exactly in parallel with his sexual metaphors: there are Yeats's masks, Sartre's 'will', and the profound influence of Yvor Winters, with whom Gunn was working and who, though hostile to much homosexual writing, provided ideas of rigour, discipline and impersonality which suited Gunn very well. The word 'will' recurs in the book, carrying Sartrian or Wintersian overtones but also (as in the erotic, and syllabic, 'Market at Turk', where the hustler's "bootstraps and Marine belt" are "reminders of the will") a more obviously sexual, Shakespearian resonance. Yet not all the icons are contemporary or fetishistic: from Achilles in Fighting Terms, through Julian, Jesus, St Martin, Alexander, Socrates and Brutus in The Sense of Movement, to St Paul and the "sad captains" themselves, there are also the "few with historical names". Often these figures serve to depersonalise and objectify Gunn's own ideas, but in the remarkable 'In Santa Maria del Popolo', which opens My Sad Captains, something more intimate and complex happens: it is about the conversion of St. Paul as perceived by Caravaggio as perceived by Gunn, and the 'I' who turns (punningly) "hardly enlightened" from the painting in the chapel to the congregation in the church is a vulnerable, implicated figure. The poem's final icon is not the divided self of Saul/Paul nor the immensely attractive existential-homosexual figure of Caravaggio but "the large gesture of solitary man, / Resisting, by embracing, nothingness".

My Sad Captains is a rewardingly transitional book. In a poem such as the second 'Modes of Pleasure' ("Why pretend / Love must accompany erection?"), sexual frankness is still straining after the epigrammatic, and the result is a winsome bravado, charming but not quite convincing. But in 'A Map of the City', Gunn stands back to take possession of San Francisco, fertile cruising-ground for "my love of chance", and to be possessed by it:

By the recurrent lights I see
Endless potentiality,
The crowded, broken, and unfinished!
I would not have the risk diminished.

The sense of liberation, of simple fresh air, which invigorates particularly some of the syllabic poems in My Sad Captains is overwhelming: and it perhaps needs to be said at this point, though not in a limiting sense, that a gay poet is still a gay poet when he's not writing about sex. The sexual liberation which Gunn found in California permeates poems like 'Lights among Redwood' and the most sensuous poem in the book, 'Flying above California', celebrating light, plants, mere names ("Such richness can make you drunk").

Gunn's next book, Positives, was the result of a year's return to England and a collaboration with his photographer brother, Ander. The finest creative result of this period is in fact a much later poem ('Talbot Road'), and the poem-captions in Positives are designedly and necessarily low-key: one, opposite a photograph of a boy in a cafe, restates with engaging directness a sub-text from 'Elvis Presley'. The boy is "a rough young animal" who knows that "Youth is power" and who "makes, now, / a fine gesture, inviting / experience to try him". The poem, and indeed Positives as a whole, anticipates two subsequent developments in Gunn's work: the gradual substitution of ordinary, often unnamed people for the earlier icons, and the movement towards a hesitant, exploratory free verse.

That is the mode Gunn adopts for 'Touch', the title-poem of his 1967 collection and one which has a double-edged significance. The striking point about it ought to be its novelty—a first-person love poem, addressed to a lover in bed, and not involving a narrator, a historical figure, or a dream (even so, the lover is addressed as a sexless "you", is already asleep, and the cat got there first). Still more striking, however, is the fact that Gunn had managed to produce four previous books without including such a poem: it was still, even in the late sixties, a difficult kind of poem for a writer of his stature to publish, and anyway Gunn's talent didn't easily adapt to intimate informality. The most unequivocally successful single poem in Touch, 'Pierce Street', is formal, descriptive and meditative in the light-and-shade manner of 'In Santa Maria del Popolo'; while his next book, Moly (1971), joyously liberated by sunlight and LSD, is the most formally iambic of all his later collections.

One can see why. For Gunn, liberation demands constraint almost as much as constraint demands liberation. In Moly, sexual freedom is transmuted—through drugs, flowers, music, places, people—into hectic, benign celebration: it takes all Gunn's iambic discipline to hold it in place, but he succeeds marvellously. In poems (among his very best) such as 'The Fair in the Woods', 'Flooded Meadows', 'Grasses', 'The Messenger' and 'Sunlight', the sexuality is implicit because genuinely liberated, carried on a wave of articulate optimism.

Given the political and social changes of the seventies and eighties, it couldn't last: the transition from Moly to Jack Straw's Castle (1976) is, precisely, the transition from dream to nightmare. Yet the fragmented, nightmare title-sequence (whose origins Gunn describes in the autobiographical essay, 'My Life up to Now') ends in a deliberate, iambic gesture of affirmation and also of defiance:

The beauty's in what is, not what may seem.
I turn. And even if he were a dream
—Thick sweating flesh against which I lie curled—
With dreams like this, Jack's ready for the world.

"Ten years ago," Gunn told W.I. Scobie in 1977, "it wouldn't have occurred to me to end the title poem in Jack Straw's Castle as I do." Partly because he couldn't, but also because he needn't have done so: it is the gestures of repression, like the Christopher Street raid and the closure of the Sonoma County Geysers (or in England the Gay News blasphemy trial and the more recent Section 28 of the Local Government Act) which urge the gay poet towards the dangerous but necessary stridencies of sexual propaganda. Gunn is aware of both danger and necessity, but these are easy matters to misjudge. In Jack Straw's Castle, for instance, Gunn tamed some stridencies in the poems, depriving 'Fever' of both general tanginess and specific detail (like "joints and amyl"), and losing altogether one section of 'The Geysers' with its rather charming digression on the variousness of male nipples and its beatific final vision of America as "One great brave luminous green-gold meeting place". On the other hand, he included in his most recent full-length book, The Passages of Joy (1982), one sexual poem, 'The Miracle', in which the failure of tone is as complete as it was in much earlier pieces like 'Lofty in the Palais de Danse' (Fighting Terms) and 'The Beaters' (The Sense of Movement): all three are weakened by an apparent inability to perceive, or to distance through irony, the potential absurdity of their subjects.

The successes among Gunn's recent sexually open poems are of two distinct kinds, though unified by the most consistent thread in his literary career—as always, his best writing occurs when physicality and the world of ideas, impulse and intellect, most closely reinforce each other. One kind of poem is the free verse anecdote which, lacking the more obvious shapings of metre and rhyme, especially needs the shaping discipline of the intellect. Thus, in 'The Idea of Trust', the anecdote about "pretty" Jim who stole from the people he lived with is given unexpected sharpness by the meditation on trust and freedom (expressed in suitably ruminative, hesitant verse) which it provokes. That effect, it has to be said, is rather less in evidence in The Passages of Joy, where the anecdotes are more often left to speak for themselves, though the observation in poems such as 'Bally Power Play' and 'Slow Waker' is affectionate and acute.

The main strength of The Passages of Joy is in the other kind of poem—extended, reflective, retrospective. 'Talbot Road', relaxed and almost prosy but in its accumulation of evocative detail absolutely compelling, recalls the magical mid-sixties year Gunn spent in London. 'Transients and Residents' remembers an assortment of friends until interrupted by a piece of elegant self-analysis which moves in from the garden and the study to a self-portrait of the author himself:

At last, you might think, the real Thom Gunn, until a couple of lines later he points out that these are things "That help me if not lose then leave behind, / What else, the self." He emerges from the self-portrait as an attractive, plausible ventriloquist, nothing how in letters he mimics the style of his correspondents and concluding, "I manage my mere voice on postcards best".

He emerges, too, as a continuously youthful poet, in a way which has sometimes disconcerted his readers. And here, I think, it is for once proper to insist on the distinctness of the homosexual view of life: it is, after all, a simple fact that most heterosexuals, as parents and then as grandparents, have their social roles and responsibilities quite clearly defined by age in a way that gay men don't. Socialising homosexuals, on the other hand, tend to inhabit a world of bars and boys and pop music which cuts across the changes of attitude which otherwise come with age: it would be self-deluding to view this as the secret of eternal youth, but at best it allows a risk-taking receptiveness, and Gunn has always liked to be (as he says in 'New York') "high / on risk". During the Reagan/Thatcher years, the complex politics of gay life have become still more fraught with paradox: for instance, shadowed by AIDS, populist sentiment appears to have grown more homophobic while popular culture (as in the Communards, Erasure, Pet Shop Boys and so on) has grown more conspicuously gay-influenced. Gunn's need to provide an increasingly direct chronicle of gay life springs in part from this sort of tension.

"But my life insists on continuities," he has said, and he is right. He has always been blessed with that intelligent desire to shock which springs from essential gentleness, and on re-reading The Sense of Movement seems now a far more outrageous book than The Passages of Joy, largely because its explosive contents are wrapped in such disarmingly well-mannered verse forms. I suspect he wanted to be a bad boy from the moment he returned to London from war-time evacuation and began "eyeing the wellfed and good-looking G.I.s who were on every street"; and with Gunn, as is so often the case, the bad boy is of course the brightest in the class.