That generation of poets that emerged in Britain during the 'fifties, from start to finish of that long decade—how easy it has been for us to pretend we saw them clearly, and how little excuse they have given us for the pretence! There is Larkin, stiffening as he reaches sixty, but still interesting in the little he publishes. There is Enright, refining his ironic line with unfailing if inadequate urbanity. There is Elizabeth Jennings, bland, featureless, still writing poems. And Donald Davie, surviving his changes with an air of wear and tear that is elderly and authoritative. And Silkin with his mythic vision, and Ted Hughes with his: Hughes, most pleasing of them all to the Academy, famously fabricating his unrelenting myths at almost the same pace as Peter Redgrave.

Hughes alone can keep entire university industries alive. And then there is the man whose name was at one time inseparably linked to that of Hughes: Thomson William Gunn, of Gravesend and Hampstead and Cambridge, in 1956 labelled "a tough thinker writing for intellectual toughs like himself, today looking quite the opposite of tough or intellectual, and looking if anything rather adrift in his San Franscisco life.

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

Certainly Gunn has not kept still; but the perception of movement that gave subtlety to 'On the Move', in The Sense of Movement (1957), no longer informs his recent work, in which "boys and girls / whoosh by on skate boards", and it is far from clear what it might be that Gunn is nearer to.

The qualities that distinguished Thom Gunn's poetry at its best have been widely glossed and described, not least by the poet himself, who said of Moly in 1971 that the collection might be seen as "a debate between the passion for definition and the passion for flow." This polarity was used by Gunn's advocate, Clive Wilmer, for the title of a widely-read essay, in which Wilmer, commenting on the poem 'Iron Landscapes' (in Jack Straw's Castle, 1976), added that "the dialectic of permanence and change" is "the very dialectic which determines the creative tensions of Gunn's poetry." Thom Gunn himself has done much to confirm this view of his work, particularly in the following sentences from his essay 'My Life up to Now', where the fundamental polarity is shown to be intimately related to a wider vision:

But my life insists on continuities—between America and England, between free verse and metre, between vision and everyday consciousness. So, in the 'sixties, at the height of my belief in the possibilities of change, I knew that we all continue to carry the same baggage: in my world, Christian does not shed his burden, only his attitude to it alters. And now that the great sweep of the acid years is over, I cannot unlearn the things that I learned during them, I cannot deny the vision of what the world might be like. Everything that we glimpsed—the trust, the brotherhood, the repossession of innocence, the nakedness of spirit—is still a possibility and will continue to be so.

There have been various critics who agree with Alan Bold that Gunn "can, in fact, be staggeringly naive", and Donald Davie, writing recently in the London Review of Books, expressed concern at finding Gunn "still starry-eyed about the acid dropping sixties"; but I think we are helped further toward an understanding of what makes Gunn's poetry work when it is successful and fail when it is bad if we consider how much in his basic "dialectic" is an attempt at "the repossession of innocence".

Innocence is the touchstone even in the earliest of Gunn. In Fighting Terms (1954) the nostalgia for "an undeniable good" in 'A Kind of Ethics', for "right meanings" in 'For a Birthday', reads like an annotation of the second poem in the book, 'Here Come the Saints':

That is the whole poem. It is slight and was rightly dropped from the Selected Poems 1950—1975, but it is worth noticing because, behind the Audenesque ending, behind the emblematic design of darkness and snow and cock crow, behind the rather arthritic theatricals ("gravely cross", "gape humbly", the abruptness and violence of those motions), there is a clear sense that the impulse of the poem was one of concern. The otherness of innocence is enacted here as it is in 'Looking Glass', where the poet writes: "I still hold Eden in my garden wall." Less persuasively, no doubt: but the root concern is recognisably the same.

And it is recognisably the same in that first book's first and major poem, 'The Wound', which Gunn has referred to as "my first real poem". The poem has been widely reprinted, so here I quote only the last of its five stanzas:

I called for armour, rose, and did not reel.
But, when thought, rage at his noble pain

Flew to my head, and turning I could feel
My wound break open wide. Over again
I had to let those storm-lit valleys heal.

With its Trojan War background and its foregrounding of the figure of Achilles, and especially in its strong reminiscence throughout of Shakespear'e Patroclus—"Those wounds heal ill that men do give themselves"—this poem enigmatically invites (and rebuffs) speculation as to what is meant by the wound. I think exploration must be guided by Patroclus, in so far as considering the wounds that men do to themselves in connection with what that final stanza appears to posit as a form of mental anguish brings us very quickly to the nature of knowledge. The fourth stanza of the poem gives us this: "I was myself: subject to no man's breath." This is clear enough, militarily, as far as it goes; it also suggests very strongly the absence of the reported knowledge conveyed by cackling Thersites a line or so later. Such absence is repose, is peace: "my belt hung up, sword in the sheath." The sword, in such conditions, knows no purpose; and we remember briefly that loaded word "intent" in 'Here Come the Saints'. The wound that heals worst is knowledge, with all the hurtful intent that knowledge brings with it. The absence of knowledge is a pure purposeless peace.

This does not explain away the highly unsatisfactory riddle of 'The Wound', but I think it at least suggests that the core of the poem is the question of innocence and knowledge, Eden and exile. I say this without any wish to reduce the extremely pleasing suggestiveness which Gunn's ambiguity produces. But, if we see this, Gunn's development through his next volumes at once becomes more meaningful. The Sense of Movement is no longer leather fetishism and Sartrian talk of the will, My Sad Captains (1961) is no longer syllabic fascinations alone. If we go along with Gunn's statement, in his essay on Hardy, that all good writing is the product of obsession (and of course we should be aware of the limitations of this view), then we can see his own obsession as being with the nature of innocence and everything in those two volumes as a discourse, from one angle or another, on innocence. The famous motorcycle poems—'On the Move' and 'The Unsettled Motorcyclist's Vision of His Death'—imply a context for "the created will" as well as an envy for the "ignorance" of plants. Gunn has assured us that he is glad to have grown up without a religion; nonetheless, the myth of the Fall is present in his early poetry as an implicit texture, from the pun of 'Carnal Knowledge' through to the paradox of 'Innocence', in which the will, fully directed by a sense of purpose, becomes insensitive even to evil, and innocence, which "No doubt could penetrate, no act could harm", becomes the very opposite of innocence, looking upon a Nazi crime with subhuman unconcern.

The years from My Sad Captains to Touch (1967) mark Gunn's most important widening of scope, not only in the addition of syllabic and free verse forms to the metrical precision of the 'fifties, but also in the colouring of the idea of innocence in shades of compassion and trust. Compassion of a kind was already in 'Considering the Snail' in 1961:

And trust becomes the thematic centre of poems like 'Touch' or 'The Discovery of the Pacific' (in Moly) just as the abuse of it links 'Confessions of the Life Artist' (in Touch) with 'The Idea of Trust' (in Jack Straw's Castle).

One particularly revealing poem from this period of San Francisco openness, of confidence, LSD and aimlessness, is 'Three', published in 1971 in Moly.

The key, as so often with Gunn, who has been reluctant to abandon his early love of the concluding apophtheg-matic note, is in the ending. In the word "learn" we are again being invited to consider the nature of knowledge, to consider the wound that takes so long to heal. The wound is knowledge; knowledge is the loss of innocence; and the impulse of the poem is its wish to repossess that lost innocence. The boy scampers to and fro in instinctual acceptance, while his parents, though naked too, are differentiated by their poses of grinning, of watching, and by the stripes on their bodies. There is indeed a sadness in their nakedness, since a lost innocence can never be relearnt: the mere world tells us so, for how can innocence be repossessed through knowing? If the poem has a certain clumsiness, it still succeeds in its central image of parents and child as emblems of paradise lost. The ideas, Gunn has said, came first; he was, he says, "preoccupied by certain related concepts", which he defines as "trust, openness, acceptance, innocence". The chance meeting on the beach gave him the embodiment. "In what sense might you say that innocence can be repossessed," he had wondered; and the chance meeting suggested Edenic nakedness as an apt emblem of repossession, or at least the attempt to repossess.

Jack Straw's Castle showed Gunn in the mid 'seventies not much further than this: nakedness in 'The Geysers' is still a key emblem, and in fact it is possible to see this volume as the turning point at which the quest for innocence becomes little more than a naive acceptance of unthinking. The obsession that gave power to 'The Wound' and 'On the Move' and 'Considering the Snail' and 'The Discovery of the Pacific', even to 'Three', has been transformed into a disturbing passivity in the face of experience. 'The Outdoor Concert' makes much of "the secret", 'Autobiography' speaks of "The sniff of the real" as if such a phrase were unproblematic, and in this absence of the pressure of thought upon his own perceptions Gunn betrays a lack of fidelity to his own most productive obsession. In The Passages of Joy, the poet's first collection for six years, this trend is regrettably confirmed.

1982 has seen the publication of a new book of poetry by Thom Gunn and a collection of prose pieces, both critical and autobiographical, written over a period of nearly two decades and now published as The Occasions of Poetry.

The Thom Gunn who emerges from these two books is not a major figure, either as poet or as critic, and the reader who meets Gunn for the first time in this work may well be puzzled to discover that a reputation of some weight is behind this writer's words.

That Gunn the critic is lacking in authority is the lesser surprise, I expect, since no one has ever supposed him to be remarkable for insight. The Occasions of Poetry collects short reviews of Gary Synder, Rod Taylor, Dick Davis and James Merrill, reprints essays on William Carlos Williams and Robert Duncan, and anthology introductions to Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson, and a lecture on Hardy's use of ballad forms"… and then passes on to forty pages of autobiographical fragments. There is little point in demonstrating the lack of scholarly discipline in Gunn's essays: his manner is too naive, and smacks rather too much of impatience, for his achievement ever to be anything but literary journalism, at times perhaps of a sophisticated kind. Possibly we are surprised if we remember that Gunn joined the English department at Berkeley, California, in 1959, and left in 1966, a year after being given tenure: what, we wonder, had he published in those years, that a university of high standing should wish him to teach on its staff full-time? The Occasions of Poetry, however, knows nothing of the academic career-maker: only unambitious journalistic work is reprinted.

This said, certain stray remarks remain in the mind after one puts down this book. I am not thinking only of silly assertions, such as "Robert Hunter's words for the Grateful Dead or Robbie Robertson's for the Band are good ballads and good poems by any standard." The excessive trust that we all agree on what is "good", and that the phrase "by any standard" is uncontroversial, need no comment. But there are other statements which, because they are superficially less contentious, need careful consideration all the more. One such is Gunn's view, in the piece on Hardy, that ballad poetry and the reflective lyric share a tonality, defined as "economy and impersonality", and proceed from a common root. This view can be supported, but only with carefully chosen examples, for the majority of poems that can be described as reflective lyric—such as Gray's 'Elegy'—are as different as anything can be from ballads such as 'Edward' or 'Sir Patrick Spens'. Gunn suppresses the inconvenient evidence. Or again: in his introduction to Jonson's poetry, Gunn writes:

… all poetry is occasional: whether the occasion is an external event like a birthday or a declaration of war, whether it is an occasion of the imagination, or whether it is in some sort of combination of the two"… The occasion in all cases—literal or imaginary—is the starting point, only, of a poem, but it should be a starting point to which the poet must in some sense stay true.

This looks attractive at first glance: but in fact it very soon proves to be an insight of considerable limitation, one devoid of the liberating effect of critical wisdom. What, after all, do we gain by generalising the term "occasional" in this way? The term traditionally has a fairly precise meaning, so that it can be used as a tool in analysis; in Gunn's usage that exactness is lost and the tool becomes useless. The attraction of the idea is only brief, for its implications are counterproductive.

Clive Wilmer suggests in his introduction to The Occasions of Poetry that Gunn has written "criticism of lasting interest" (which I do not think is the case) and that Gunn, by virtue of his practice as a poet, is a particularly good reader of other poets' work. This second observation works better in reverse, for it seems to me that it is from the responses to other poetry toward his own poetry that we see the most interesting patterns emerging. In the 1965 Williams essay, for example, Gunn praises "a habitual sympathy" and sees Williams' "stylistic qualities" as governed by "a tenderness and generosity of feeling which make them fully humane". This was when Gunn was writing Positives (1966) and Touch (1967), collections in which a naively generous sympathy begins to move to the forefront of Gunn's poetry. Again: in 'My Life up to Now' Gunn writes of metre and free verse:

Rhythmic form and subject-matter are locked in a permanent embrace: that should be an axiom nowadays. So, in metrical verse, it is the nature of the control being exercised that becomes part of the life being spoken about. It is poetry making great use of the conscious intelligence, but its danger is bombast—the controlling music drowning out everything else. Free verse invites a different style of experience, improvisation. Its danger lies in being too relaxed, too lacking in controlling energy.

This reminds us of Gunn's concern, writing of Snyder, that looseness may lead to dullness, that "the accidental world itself might take over the poem". This concern reflects the troubles in which Gunn as technician has found himself, to an ever greater degree, since the midsixties.

What then of Gunn the poet in 1982? The Passages of Joy is a bad, boring book, the least endearing Gunn has written. It is bad because the pursuit of innocence has been filtered through that "habitual sympathy" to become a big sentimental gesture which announces that it wishes to love and understand the world, but which loses power by its very inclusiveness. It is bad because this sentimentality is confused with a scale of humane values, and therefore produces poems that are at one of two extremes: either they merely record series of impressions, or they attempt heavy-handed didactic lessons. As to the first, Peter Porter recently wrote in The Observer: "He does not strike me as having the right ear to make a success of poems which are essentially vignettes of casual urban life." And as to the second, I think Gunn's didacticism could best be described as a kind of Frisco Vernon Scannell: 'Sweet Things' and 'As Expected' are good examples of what I mean.

And this badness becomes boring because that tension of definition and flow, the dialectic of permanence and change, has been complacently removed. The implication of this is upsetting: it suggests that Gunn has settled into a selfsatisfaction that poet of 'On the Move' could never have countenanced. And in practice it means that the long loose poems are less under control than ever: the accidental world takes over, and that dullness results that is the concomitant of any uninspired improvisation.

Lest this seem unfair, here is the second half of a poem called 'New York':

I promise that this poem is among the better half of the collection. What is bad here is present not only in the wholly disproportionate title nor even in the pretence of the final line, where we merely want to ask what Gunn was really thinking. The badness is the absence of any pressure whatsoever on the part of a shaping spirit. That absence can be defended, certainly, if we say it remains true to the random, unstructured character of actual experience: but a defence of this kind has always seemed to me extremely weak, since it admits that nothing has been done, nothing made by the poet, beyond the elements of notation. To suppose that this elementary notation will then interest a reader, who presumably encounters similar experience and, if called upon to do so, can verbalise that experience in precisely the same manner—this, I think, is arrogant. It is an arrogance that is dismally self-satisfied: and the line that ends with "and", a line so utterly unconcerned about the demands a reader may feel impelled to make, only reinforces this impression.

I should not care to be misunderstood on this. I am not complaining about free verse, like a stuffy Edwardian; I am regretting that complacent, undisciplined misuse of it, a misuse which Gunn himself acknowledges to be the commonest flaw in open forms. My own opinion is that Gunn has an ear that belongs between the extremes: metre tempts him toward glibness of an Empsonian Fifties kind, and free forms bring out his self-indulgent worst. But the syllabics that gave many poems in My Sad Captains, Touch and Moly their air of moving uncramped within generous confines (and yet confined): these, I think, favoured Gunn's strengths most systematically. Innocence cannot be repossessed, of course, but the gesture of making the attempt to repossess it is an important and central one in Gunn, and its wistful halftruthfulness is distorted by clearcut forms as well as by looseness.

I began by saying that it is difficult to see those poets who emerged in the 'fifties at all clearly, and Gunn perhaps poses some of the trickiest problems. Still, one thing is clear: Gunn has moved, and his movement has been all in one direction, so that in 1982, when—as Donald Davie has said—Gunn seems to have forgotten all he had ever learnt from the Elizabethans and Metaphysicals, I feel he has followed too far his principle of the 'sixties: "better, always, to accept too much than too little." Such acceptance, true, can be a kind of innocence. But it is an innocence that puts an end to poetry.