Biography Essay

The paradox of Thom Gunn's achievement is best characterized by the ambiguities inherent in the word fashion. He is a "fashioning" poet, in the old-fashioned sense—a writer preoccupied by the problems of "shaping," "determining," and "controlling" both in life and in art. But somewhat to his surprise and quite without opportunism he has also turned out to be a chronicler of fashion—a poet in whose work one can discern various trends of postwar culture: Sartrean existentialism; youth subculture; the communal aspirations of the 1960s; the consumption of hard and soft drugs. He is not a polemical poet, nor one who has been active in political movements; yet future social historians and cultural anthropologists wanting to learn about the texture of our times will probably find it more useful to turn to his work than to that of the other British poets who...