Gunn is quite consciously a writer of contrasts, who has drawn on a wide range of influences and modes. But his work none the less impresses the careful reader with its underlying consistency. He made his name, after all, as a master of rigorously traditional verse forms, and he continues to excel in them, but he has since become hardly less accomplished in a variety of 'open' forms and the verse is no less shapely. His approach is at root impersonal: his first person, like Ralegh's or Jonson's or Hardy's, is unquestionably that of a particular man, but a man who expects his individuality to be of interest in so far as it is a quality the reader shares with him…. His work, which has done much to dispel the critical orthodoxy that abstract language is inimical to poetry, has become over the years increasingly sensuous in detail, reflecting preoccupations that were there from the beginning, though not at first as qualities of the language. For this most chaste of modern poets is a philosophical hedonist—rather like Camus, of all modern moralists the one he appears to value most.

The most interesting contrast of all, perhaps, is connected with his sense of the past. What strikes us most immediately in Gunn's poems—what made him famous in fact—is their contained energy. Yet he is also, without fallng into academicism, a highly literary poet, and his literariness, far from being a limitation, may well be the main source of his strength. Gunn's vulnerability, as Donald Davie has said in praise of him, has much to do with his renunciation of the 'glibly deprecating ironies' that insulated so many of the fifties' poets from the full range of poetic possibility. In order to escape such 'facile knowingness' and the phase of British culture that it expressed, Gunn went back to the youth of English poetry 'to discover that phase of British English—Donne's, Marlowe's, above all Shakespeare's—in which the language could register without embarrassment the frankly heroic'. And in his mature work, says Davie, 'The Renaissance styles—of life more than of writing—are invoked … not to judge the tawdry present, nor to keep it at arm's length, but on the contrary so as to comprehend it in a way that extends to it not just compassion but dignity….' The only tradition in the English language that shares this verbal innocence is that of American poetry since Whitman, with all its vulnerability and spaciousnes. Gunn, who has lived in the United States since 1954, has nourished himself on that tradition too—so it is perhaps no accident that most of the essays in [The Occasions of Poetry] deal with American or Renaissance writers. (pp. 11-12)

[Gunn's] criticism is interesting for what, indirectly, it tells us about his poetry, but it is still more valuable for the way his own experience of writing illuminates what he reads. He is, quite simply, a marvellous 'reader' of other men's verse. The aspect of literary practice which engages Gunn's critical intelligence most frequently and most fruitfully is the relation of a poet's words to the subject matter that calls them forth. (p. 13)

The occasions of poetry … are only starting points. They constitute the 'shape' of experience, but the task of a poet is to seek out its 'content'. Gunn employs a variety of related metaphors to describe the journey between the two: exploration and adventure, and the related images of looting and conquest. These metaphors unite poets as diverse as Robert Duncan and Yvor Winters. (p. 14)

If the process of poetry, then, is adventure or exploration, its goal must be 'understanding'. This is a word which recurs so often … that we are justified in suspecting its meaning to be less obvious than we might at first have thought…. 'The process of understanding', says Gunn, amounts to something 'more than the business of comprehending the text … Understanding means taking (the poems) to heart, means—ultimately—acting on them.' Of course, he is referring not to the business of understanding life but to the effect of literature. But to apply the word 'understand' to experience at all is, in a sense, to draw an analogy between life and books. If we study life, we can learn from it; our chances of acting on experience are improved. (p. 16)

In recent years, Gunn's interest in American poery has moved away from the traditionalism Winters stood for towards the more loosely informal writing that acknowledges Pound and Williams as its masters. [The Occasions of Poetry], which begins with an essay written in 1965, may be read in part as a record of that shift in emphasis. During this period Gunn seems to have broadened his use of the word 'understanding'. For Jonson and Winters it was the sine qua non of poetry and implied a reduction of experience to generalized formulae. Gunn now argues that poetry is 'an attempt to grasp, with grasp meaning both to take hold of in a first bid at possession, and also to understand'. A grasp of particulars is now quite as important to him as the formulation of propositions, and it entails a concreteness of language that twenty years ago had seemed beside the point. This has nothing to do with metaphor or symbol or correlatives for private emotion. What he values is the precise rendering of physical fact as it is, in all its 'thinginess'. Yet when he says of Gary Snyder, the master of this kind of writing, 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', we realize that Gunn has not moved far from the Wintersian position, for he sees Snyder's poetry as a matter of exploration, discovery and understanding…. In attempting to notate the particulars of experience accurately, Snyder guides us gently into territory we all share. Language, after all, is a common property. When we are persuaded, through language, of the truth of a perception, we have entered the realm of generality: we have stumbled on meaning. Gunn's special talent as a critic lies in his ability to show how, as we read, we move in this way from occasion to meaning. (pp. 16-17)