Thom Gunn
born August 29, 1929, Gravesend, Kent,
England
died April 25, 2004, San Francisco,
California, U.S.
English poet whose verse is notable for
its adroit, terse language and
counterculture themes.
The son of a successful London
journalist, Gunn attended University College
School in London and Trinity College in
Cambridge, where he received a B.A. (1953)
and M.A. (1958). In 1954 he moved to San
Francisco, California, to study at Stanford
University. He later taught at the
University of California at Berkeley.
Gunn’s first volume of verse was Fighting
Terms (1954; rev. ed. 1962). The Sense of
Movement (1957) won a Somerset Maugham
Award, which he used for travel in Italy.
“On the Move,” a celebration of
black-jacketed motorcyclists from that
volume, is one of his best-known poems. In
the late 1950s Gunn’s poetry became more
experimental. He published My Sad Captains
in 1961, and Selected Poems, which also
contains the work of his Cambridge
contemporary Ted Hughes, appeared in 1962.
Positives (1966) is a group of poems about
Londoners, with photographs by the poet’s
brother Ander Gunn. In the 1970s Gunn began
to explore themes of homosexuality and
drugs, and notable collections came to
include Moly (1971), Jack Straw’s Castle
(1976), and The Man with Night Sweats
(1992), which focuses on the AIDS epidemic.
Among his other works are Selected Poems
1950–1975 (1979), The Passages of Joy
(1982), and Boss Cupid (2000). The Occasion
of Poetry (1982) and Shelf Life (1993) are
collections of autobiographical and critical
essays. Gunn received numerous awards,
including a Guggenheim (1971) and MacArthur
(1993) fellowship.
