Thom Gunn Feature

Thom Gunn has been writing poems in traditional meters and free-verse close to thirty years, exploiting by turns the full range of Anglo-American poetic forms. Already an impressive poet as an undergraduate, Gunn unsettled the Oxford/Cambridge literary world of the early 1950s with tough, brainy stanzas full of syntactic vigor and a verbal knottiness reminiscent of Donne, matched to a philosophically existential sensibility . . . As a master poet Gunn is a master of forms: he knows what different forms can do, what kind of effects they have, and how they might capture and give shape to imagination and experience. When does a poet who can write in couplets choose not to? How does the pressure of design urge life into a shape? —Joshua Weiner

Read the full essay