Thom Gunn is often classed as a Movement poet but though he first became known about the same time as the other poets of that group, around 1953, he belongs to a younger generation. He is seven years younger than Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, four years younger than John Wain, three years younger than Elizabeth Jennings. Born at Gravesend in 1929, the son of a successful Fleet Street journalist, Herbert Gunn, Thom Gunn was educated at University College School in London and at Trinity College, Cambridge. At Cambridge he had the sort of career which often precedes literary distinction, editing an anthology of undergraduate verse, being president of the University English Club, and taking a first in both parts of the English tripos. The Fantasy Press published his first pamphlet of verse when he was still an undergraduate, in 1953, and his first volume, Fighting Terms, in 1954, shortly after he had taken his degree.

His second volume, The Sense of Movement, came out in 1957, published by Faber's, and won him a Somerset Maugham Award. Between 1954 and 1957, he had been teaching and studying at Stanford University in California, being much influenced by Professor Yvor Winters. He used his Somerset Maugham award to spend some time in Rome. His most recent volume, My Sad Captains, came out this year. He now teaches English at Berkeley in San Francisco. He visits England reasonably frequently, but nobody could call his poems insularly English. Italian painting, Californian scenes and characters, Greek mythology, French literature and philosophy frequently give him the pegs to hang his poems on. In his work there is nothing of the insularity or the distrust of cultural or philosophic themes that, in different ways, marks Amis and Larkin. He resembles these two only in his admirable care for lucidity of poetic thought and language. He is not weakly jocular as these two sometimes are, nor on the other hand has he the humour which is one of their strengths. He is often a witty poet, in the sense of being concise and epigrammatic, but he is never heartily familiar in tone. He keeps at a certain cool distance from the reader. His poetry also is less a poetry either of acceptance of society, as Larkin's is, or of sharp social criticism, like that of D. J. Enright, than a poetry of firm assertion of the romantic will.

With Larkin, he seems to me the best poet of the group that became known around 1953, and a contrast with Larkin may help to bring out some of his central qualities. What Larkin seems to me to be repeatedly saying in many of his best poems is that a sensible man settles for second-bests. One of Larkin's best poems, for instance, is about being tempted to give up a safe, dull job for the sake of wild adventure and firmly, and the reader is meant to feel rightly, resisting the temptation; several other good poems, on the other hand, are about being tempted by love or by the spectacle of happy domesticity into some permanent kind of emotional relationship, but retreating, since Larkin as a poet needs a kind of freedom which is not wild, but which does depend on a firm cutting down of the number of one's personal relationships and emotional commitments. Larkin, one might say, is the poet of emotional economy. The title poem of his volume The Less Deceived (a poem about a girl being kidnapped and raped in the mid-Victorian age) is both about how we should not waste our sympathy where it cannot help and also about how the young man in the story may have felt an even sharper grief than the girl's when he had done his wild, fierce, wicked thing and burst into "fulfilment's desolate attic".

Larkin's tender poem about old horses at grass seems fundamentally to be about the idea that such real freedom as most of us can hope to enjoy in life will be the freedom of pensioned retirement, with no continuing social function, with enough to eat, and with some pleasant memories. His poem about looking at a girl friend's snapshot album is fundamentally about how cherished images are in some ways better than difficult continuing relationships; and the poem about the flavourless town where he grew up is, on the other hand, about how we should not fake up pleasant memory images where there are none. The total effect is that of a certain bleakness. When I think of Larkin I always think of Henry James's great short story, "The Beast in the Jungle": about a man who is so over-shadowed by the sense of some nameless horror or terror that may jump on him if he takes risks with life, that he never takes any risks. When the beast does jump, it jumps, not as actual terror, but as the sudden awareness that a long life crippled by fear and caution has been wasted. The hero has never dared the high dive, never swum at the deep end. And it is too late now. There is a splendid relevant sentence of Elizabeth Bowen's: "One is empowered to live fully: occasion does not offer". Larkin's poetry is about not affronting the unoffered occasion. Gunn's is about snatching at occasion, whatever the risks, and whether it offers or not.

Outer order and personal stability, for Larkin, depend on our swallowing our gall. Gunn refuses to do this. I am proud to remember that, in 1953, when he was still an undergraduate, I included three early poems of his in an anthology called Springtime. The three poems I chose happened to illustrate, luckily, certain themes and attitudes that were to be recurrent. The first, about the world of the Elizabethan poet, began

It was a violent time. Wheels, racks and fires
In every poet's mouth, and not mere rant"…

Gunn insisted in this poem that the heroic attitude, which he sees as behind all notable poetry, should be stimulated, not quenched, by a threatening age. It is the poet's business to make tragic sense of it all:

In street, in tavern, happening would cry
" I am myself, but part of something greater,
Find poets what that is, do not pass by
For feel my fingers in your pia mater:
I am a cruelly insistent friend;
You cannot smile at me and make an end."

The second poem I chose was called "Helen's Rape" and what it expressed might be called a nostalgia, though tinged a little with irony, for the kind of primitive violence that sees itself as moved by a divine force. This poem began:

Hers was the last authentic rape:
From forced content of common breeder
Bringing the violent dreamed escape"…

The "forced content" (meaning constrained contentment but carrying an overtone of enforced containment) is that which Helen enjoyed as an ordinary hausfrau, a "common breeder" or junior matron, with Menelaus. The "violent dreamed escape" is Helen's rape, or abduction, by Paris, but she had dreamt of a more genuinely divine abduction, or rape, like that of her mother Leda or of Europa. The real age of the gods is already past, and though Paris was inspired by Aphrodite, or moved by a divine madness, he had to soothe common-sense critics, and to pretend that he abducted Helen for political reasons, in retaliation for a similar abduction by the Greeks of a Trojan princess, his aunt. At the end of the poem, Gunn brings in the idea that only a simulacrum of Helen was taken to Troy and that the real Helen was wafted to Egypt. And yet even a distant Helen would know the harrowing griefs which even her image had brought on Troy.

So, at least, I interpret the very difficult last stanza:

Helen herself could not through flesh
Abandon flesh; she felt surround
Her absent body, never fresh
The mortal context, and the mesh
Of the continual battle's sound.

The reference might just be, however, not to the legend of Helen in Egypt but simply to the idea that because Paris was only a hero, not a god, his carnal love could not transform her carnality into the divine. I think Gunn possibly ought to have put a comma after "fresh". If the reference is to Egypt, the meaning will be: "Though bodily transported to Egypt Helen could not remain aware of the havoc which Paris's love of her body had wrought: even absent in Egypt she felt herself surrounded and sullied ('never fresh') by the lust and violence of the Trojan war". Or it may be that a comma should not be added after "fresh" but omitted after "body" and that what she felt surrounding her Egyptian body was the "mortal context", the circumstances of death, which are never fresh, not so much in the sense that they are not refreshed or refreshing, but in the sense that they have been there from the beginning, they never started.

The puzzles of such a stanza suggest that though Gunn is learnedly lucid he is never likely to be a popular writer. The reader of this short poem is expected to have a very detailed knowledge of Greek mythology, as the reader of the one about Elizabethan poetry needs a detailed knowledge of Elizabethan literature and history. They were the only two poems in Springtime to which I felt I had to add notes.

The third poem I chose, "Carnal Knowledge", stated a third recurring theme, the idea that sexual love can rarely, whether or not this is a good thing, break down, or merge, the essential separateness of two people. The stanzas had an excessively clever Empsonian refrain,

You know I know you know I know you know, alternating as,

I know you know I know you know I know,

but in the last stanza this was truncated:

Abandon me to stammering, and go;
If you have tears, prepare to cry elsewhere—
I know of no emotion we can share.
Your intellectual protests are a bore
And even now I pose, so now go, for
I know you know.

This was a more awkward, a more undergraduate poem than the others, and I feel that even today Gunn is never quite at his best when he writes of personal relationships. But implicit in the poem, though not brought cleanly through, was a theme which he was soon to use more powerfully, not a half regret at the great difficulty of breaking down separateness, but a horror at the idea that such a breaking down, such a merging, should ever be possible at all.

I included in another anthology, Poetry Now, a poem which expressed perhaps less humanly but certainly more powerfully than "Carnal Knowledge" this horror of merging. Two men have been sharing a bed (or the two men may be different aspects of the poet's one personality) and one of them gets up in the small hours, looks out at the moon, and declaims:

'Inside the moon I see a hell of love.
There love is all, and no one is alone.
The song of passion deafens, as no choice
Of individual word can hold its own
Against the rule of that anonymous noise.
And wait, I see more clearly; craters, canals,

Are smothered by two giant forms of mist
So that no features of the land remain.
Two humming clouds of moisture intertwist
Agreed so well, they cannot change to rain
And serve to clean the common ground beneath.

Singing there fell, locked in each other's arms,
Cursed with content, pair by successive pair,
Committed centuries to lie in calms
They stayed to rot into that used-up air
No wind can shift, it is so thick, so thick!'

The ringing voice stopped, but as if one must
Finish in moral, stumbled on and said:
'In that still fog all energy is lost.'
The moonlight slunk on, darkness touched his head.
He fell back, then he turned upon the pillow.

It will be noted that in this passage, as in the earlier passage about Helen, the word "content" which generally carries a strong pro-feeling in English poetry ("sweet content"), carries a strong anti-feeling; similarly the word "calms" instead of suggesting "calm after storm" recalls the rotting, glistering sea on which the ship lay becalmed in "The Ancient Mariner". Literary reminiscence and counterpoint is one of Gunn's main instruments. The giant lovers transformed into clouds might remind us of Ixion attempting to embrace Juno, but the line,

Singing there fell, locked in each other's arms,

gains extra force if one recalls Paolo and Francesca. The line that gives the moral, "In that still fog all energy is lost" recalls an urgent line of Spender's: "Drink here of energy, and only energy". The attack, however, as in Spender's case, is not so much on the stuff of which romantic love is made as on its self-centredness and stupefying effect. The clouds could dissolve into rain and "clean the solid earth beneath", or the self-centredness of love, perhaps, could be translated into a socially useful emotion or at least a psychologically useful one; the "solid earth beneath" may be the permanent personality and the twisted cloud figures projections of an attempted romantic escape from that. When the speaker turns on his pillow at the end, he may perhaps be turning not towards the sleep of exhaustion but to make love; in which case, perhaps, he has not found his own eloquence practically persuasive. But the love, as between two men, would be, by definition, sterile. This seems to me one of the most powerful of Gunn's earlier poems, with an almost Dantesque quality of visionary horror.

I know, however, few people who share this admiration. And I know of many admirers of another early poem from Fighting Terms, which strikes me as comical, but unconsciously so (Gunn, as I have said, has plenty of wit of the severer kind, but almost no humour). We have seen that separateness, self-sufficiency, energy even as something that inspires to restless movement with no clear purpose, are positive values for Gunn; so, sometimes, and it seems to me less attractively, are domination and ruthlessness. The early poem which strikes me as unconsciously selfparodic is called "A Village Edmund". Edmund is Edmund in King Lear and we are to think also of Gray's "village Hampden" in the Elegy. Edmund is admittedly the most humanly sympathetic of all Shakespeare's villains, but Gunn's "rough and lecherous" village counter-part of him seems to me, as it were, a Tony Hancock part:

One girl he fancied as much as she fancied him.
'For a moment,' she thought, 'Our bodies can bestride
A heaven whose memories must support my life.'
He took her to the deserted countryside,
And she lay down and obeyed his every whim.

When it was over he pulled his trousers on.
'Demon lovers must go,' he coldly said.
And walked away from the rocks to the lighted town.
'Why should heaven,' she asked, 'be for the dead?'
And she stared at the pale intolerable moon.

What spoils this as serious poetry is not, however, so much the callowness of the attitude as the weakness of the writing; the melodramatic novelettish language of the girl; the stiltedness of phrases like "obeyed his every whim": the conscious manly toughness of the line about pulling his trousers on, and the at once coy and trite narcissism (for I take it the poet is emotionally identifying himself with Edmund) of "he coldly said". The pale intolerable moon of the last line, for that matter, is very much out of some old romantic property-box. Gunn's failures of tone and feeling do not come from an excessive chumminess or prosiness (as, say, Amis's or Larkin's failures of that sort might come) but from an occasional self-admiring melodrama or sentimentality. They are more like the failures of Stephen Spender (who seems to me a better poet at his best than he is generally made out to be, and who seems to me also temperamentally in some ways not unlike Gunn, who has gone out of his way in one poem to attack him); in many ways, in fact, Gunn is more like a nineteen-thirties' than a nineteen-fifties' poet. His are poems without a Muse, or the Muse rather is a male Muse, village Edmunds, warriors in byrnies, black-jacketed James Dean characters roaring through small American towns on motor-cycles. But a fine intellectual discipline can make something universal out of this, as it might seem in itself, somewhat dubious material.

Let me take as an example of what seems to me a very notable success on Gunn's part, the first poem in his 1957 volume, The Sense of Movement. This is called "On the Move" and these young men on motor-cycles are vividly the topic but savingly in the end not the theme of the poem. The theme, rather, is Sartrean existential humanism. I want to examine in turn the last three lines of each of the five eight line stanzas. In these last three lines, in each stanza, Gunn presses from particulars towards a persuasive generality, which becomes progressively more firmly defined; he presses towards the stating of a moral. In the first stanza, the poet vividly observes birds on the edge of a dusty American road, birds which "follow some hidden purpose", while the poet himself is vainly "seeking their instinct, or their poise, or both". He sums it up:

One moves with an uncertain violence
Under the dust thrown by a baffled sense
Or the dull thunder of approximate words.

"Baffled sense" is not there, or only partly, what it might be in Keats, sensuous apprehension baffled by trying to reach beyond itself, but baffled intellectual apprehension; the baffled sense of what it is all about.

In the second stanza, the boys on motor-cycles, anticipated already in the first stanza in the dust and the scariness of the birds, roar by. And we are told of them in the last three lines:

In gleaming jackets trophied with the dust,
They strap in doubt—by hiding it, robust—
And almost hear a meaning in their noise.

The baffling dust here becomes a trophy, a prize, of pointless speed; and the noise of the motor-cycles (in communication theory noise is contrasted with sound, and means any interference with the transmission of the message) becomes paradoxically for them a kind of communication. Very often in Gunn apparently simple and ordinary words like "meaning" and "noise" can, in their juxtaposition, carry in this way a lucid paradox.

In the third stanza, Gunn points out that the motor-cyclists are not riding towards any known goal but as fast as possible away from a known and frustrating background. It is they who scare the birds across the fields but it is inevitable that even a right natural order should yield to even a subrational human will. And there is this to be said for the motor-cyclists, that they are emblems of a larger human condition:

Men manufacture both machine and soul,
And use what they imperfectly control
To dare a future from the taken routes.

The idea behind these admirably compact lines is Sartre's that man creates himself, creates his "soul", by arbitrary but important choices. His choices cannot be made in complete foreknowledge of their consequences ("use what they imperfectly control"). But what is even more worrying is that the general consequences of all possible choices might be thought to be boringly worked out already. This abstract philosophical idea is beautifully translated into properly poetic language. The "taken" routes are at once the routes daringly taken, or undertaken, by the young motor-cyclists to create a future and they are also the routes, the roads there on the map, which would not be there at all if they had not been "taken" dully by generations of men already. Again, very plain, apparently obvious words produce a paradox.

The fourth stanza justifies the choice of the motor-cyclists as at least a partial solution of the human problem. Man is not necessarily at odds with the world because he is not purely an animal. Nor is he damned because, half but only half an animal, he has to rely not on "direct instinct" but on movements-say, movements of history or politics—which carry him on part of the way, even though in the end movement "divides and breaks":

One joins the movement in a valueless world,
Choosing it, till, both hurler and the hurled,
One moves as well, always toward, toward.

What one moves "toward" is not to be abstractly defined, but one is moving away from that which one has found valueless (but there is also the Sartrean idea that value is imposed by choice, not there in the world to compel choice). One may be moving towards value.

In the fifth and last stanza, the cyclists vanished, the "self-defined, astride the created will". (Again notice how a philosophical concept is beautifully translated into a poetical conceit, the "manufactured" soul finding its emblem, or symbol, in the "manufactured" motor-cycle.) The cyclists are right, for Gunn, to burst through and away from towns which are no homes either for the naturalness of birds or the stillness of saints who, like birds, "complete their purposes". The justification of these "rebels without a cause" is that our civilized world, the world, say, which Larkin sadly accepts, has in its frustrating complication no home for either naturalness or holiness. And when one is, however restlessly and violently, "on the move",

At worst one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute, in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.

Gunn is not in any ordinary sense of the word a religious poet, but he is (both in the ordinary and to some degree in the literary sense of the word) a metaphysical poet. The kinds of metaphysics that interest him are very different from those that interest Eliot, say, yet there are obvious broad affinities between the pattern of argument in this poem and some of the patterns of argument in Four Quartets. I have thought it better in this article to examine what one might call the broad human interest of Gunn's poetry, taking three or four sample poems as pegs to drape my exposition round, rather than to review, or re-review his volumes in detail, or to go in detail into the verbal texture of his work. Swiftness, directness, lucidity, beautifully exact dramatic or logical construction in a poem, mark his work much more than richness of imagery or any sort of lyrical cry; the kind of technical-appreciative words one would use about his verse are supple, muscular, "on the move". But his deep authenticity comes from range of curiosity, an undefeatedness of spirit, and a swift readiness to make choices, without any hesitant bother about how the choices will be socially taken. If Larkin is a fine poet born, in a sense, middle-aged, Gunn is a poet who should have a peculiarly direct appeal not for angry, but for fierce, young men.