SOURCE: "Rule and Energy: The Poetry of Thorn Gunn," in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 23, Spring, 1982, pp. 134-51.

In the following essay, Parini maintains that Gunn is able to balance his energetic approach to language and theme with traditional forms to create "a tense climate of balanced opposition."

In an early poem addressed to his mentor, Yvor Winters, Thorn Gunn writes:

 You keep both Rule and Energy in view,
Much power in each, most in the balanced two:
Ferocity existing in the fence
Built by an exercised intelligence. 

These potentially counterdestructive principles exist everywhere in his work, not sapping the poems of their strength but creating a tense climate of balanced opposition. Any poet worth thinking twice about possesses at least an energetic mind; but it is the harnessing of this energy which makes for excellence. In Gunn's work an apparently unlimited energy of vision finds, variously, the natural...