SOURCE: "Loud Music, Bars, and Boisterous Men," in PN Review, Vol. 16, No. 2, 1989, pp. 39-41.

In the following essay, Powell determines the role of sexuality in Gunn's poetry.

Though he will probably cringe at the thought, Thorn Gunn is the most distinguished living English gay poet, and after Auden the most significant English gay poet of the century. That's the sort of statement to make any poet cringe, which is why I want to get rid of it at the outset. It could all too easily seem to imply that writers can be sorted by sexuality into separate compartments, or that homosexual writers address a limited constituency of homosexual readers, neither of which must be the case. Gunn's sexuality matters to his readers partly because it has been, increasingly, a major theme in his work, and partly because his writing career spans and reflects a period of profoundly unsettling...