SOURCE: "Definition and Flow: Thorn Gunn in the 1970s," in British Poetry Since 1970: A Critical Survey, edited by Peter Jones and Michael Schmidt, Persea Books, 1980, pp. 64-74.

In the following essay, Wilmer discusses the influences on Gunn's work, in particular such poets as Yvor Winters, William Carlos Williams, and Ezra Pound.

Thom Gunn's My Sad Captains, first published in 1961, has two sections quite distinct in character, the first consisting of poems in traditional metres, the second of apparently lighter pieces in syllabic verse. Gunn has since renounced syllabics in favour of free verse, but his publications still require the reader to accept that metrical poems are different in kind from poems in 'open' forms. D.H. Lawrence, in the Preface to the American edition of his New Poems (an essay whose influence Gunn has acknowledged), arguing the case for such a distinction, wrote of free verse as pre-eminently...