1976

Thom Gunn (1929–2004) was educated at Cambridge, and left England shortly after the publication of his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms (Faber and Faber, 1954). He moved to California to be with Mike Kitay (with whom he lived until his death) and to study poetry with Yvor Winters, whom he described as ‘the most exciting teacher I ever had’.1 In a PN Review interview (70, November-December 1989), Gunn said that he didn’t think about his audience when he was writing, and that when he came across a reference to himself as ‘an Anglo-American poet’ he thought ‘“Yes, that’s what I am I’m an Anglo-American poet.” So that resolves that question! I don’t think of the audiences as being that different.’ Jack Straw’s Castle was published in 1976.

FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

7 June 1976


Dear Thom Gunn


Charles Monteith gave me your address.2 I am now editing, with Brian Cox, Donald Davie and C.H. Sisson, a magazine – shortly to become quarterly – called Poetry Nation Review. Up to now it has been twice-yearly.

      I have also recently been finding some poets whose work seems to me to share a debt to your poems and to Winters’s. They are Cambridge people – Dick Davis, Clive Wilmer, and – especially – Robert Wells.3 He seems to me better than just good, and I plan to publish him wherever I can. There are a few others who might, similarly, be seen as having certain debts to you – especially in your ‘middle period’ (that period must seem to be moving further and further forward in time!).

      My plan is to have three of these poets write in Poetry Nation Review brief essays on Jack Straw’s Castle. I was wondering whether there was any chance of you considering writing a piece for us on what Winters continues to mean, in view of some of your formal (and vital) experiments and developments?

      The magazine, I should hasten to add, is not a Wintersian Journal. You know Donald’s ambivalent respect; mine is less ambivalent but also less instructed (I love the poems but find the critic hard to deal with).

      If you were in a position to write anything for us, I’d be grateful. Especially on a Wintersian theme. My hope is to give the magazine a kind of depth by, in verse, publishing no fewer than four poems at a time by any poet; and, in the prose, a balance achieved through juxtaposition and contrast (though, alas and woe, the magazine has a somewhat consistent polemic).


Thanks in any case for your attention.

Sincerely,

Michael Schmidt


FROM THOM GUNN

San Francisco

16 June 1976


Dear Michael Schmidt,


Thank you very much for your letter, which I have been thinking about for the last week. I have known about Davis, Wilmer and Wells since the publication of their joint book Shade Mariners about six years ago.4 And I have liked their work a lot. In fact I just wrote, a few weeks ago, a reviews of Davis’s book, In the Distance, which I think will be in the next issue of Thames Poetry. Much as I like to think of them writing about me – I am very flattered – perhaps it would not be a good idea to ask him. Him reviewing me and me reviewing him within just a few months would look a bit like back scratching.

      There are difficulties about the piece on Winters, all of them in my own head. I do want to write something about him one day, partly to get everything straight for my own benefit.5 But I don’t see it very clearly yet. You speak about your ambivalence with Winters: it could not be greater than my own. There was the personal sweetness of the man, and then the public ferocity, and then again the disastrous tendency to confuse a man’s personal worth with his poetic worth. Also though there is much I admire about his criticism – and much I have learned from it – it excludes a tremendous amount of what I consider to be indispensable poetry. His own poetry was fantastic, I agree, and there seems to me no question at all that he was one of the abidingly good poets of the century. Ultimately, I suppose, my problem with him was this, and still is: learned and wise as he was, beautiful poet as he was, he felt a distaste for the multitudinous particularity of life, there was a fastidiousness, ultimately perhaps a fear for all the careless thriving detail of everything, a strong tendency – increasing as he got older – to exclude all that could not be transformed to principle. Perhaps the main reason, after all, why he couldn’t stand such an obviously great poet as Whitman, was because Whitman was one of the great enjoyers – and in the end I have to admit that because his sympathies were wider than Winters’s his understanding was wider too.

      But I’m not sure how to go about writing this for a year or two, if ever. Maybe the way to go about it would be to make it an entirely personal and chronological account. But I’ll postpone it for now. Meanwhile I thank you very much for asking me, and I will send you some stuff some time (I had already promised D[onald] D[avie] I would). I’m having a peculiarly infertile summer, but I might be able to send you something in time for the issue you speak of if you give me the deadline. (This is more of a hope than a promise.)


Best,

Thom Gunn


FROM MICHAEL SCHMIDT

Manchester

24 June 1976


Dear Mr Gunn,


Warm thanks for your letter of 16 June. I half-expected that your reply to the Winters letter would be tentative, but I’m very glad to know that if thoughts take a prose form you will let us see them! I thought the letter itself expressed – very clearly – the nature of the predicament. I find it helpful, in any event, and am grateful for it.

      The problem of an excluding art is one which worries me a great deal. In a sense, it is this very element that draws me to Winters. The terms in which the excluding works tend, sometimes, in the best poems, to suggest what tensions are being excluded. The very act implies their presence. But a kind of desiccation (especially in the critical approach) may follow.

      You might like to know that Clive Wilmer, after I had been urged to read the poems by my colleague Gareth Reeves (he met you briefly during his long stay at Stanford), sent me the poems – all of them – of Edgar Bowers.6 I was a little disappointed with the first book, but the second book and the five new poems interested me tremendously – especially that Autumn sequence and a few of the short poems. I am asking Clive to try to secure for Carcanet Press rights to publish a Collected Poems for England. Bowers is the sort of poet (I’m sorry for that phrase!) I would most like to publish. My problem is that I have had considerable difficulties with Godine in Boston, and I have vowed never to deal with them again. We printed Middleton’s last book for them. So I am praying that Bowers is contractually bound to Swallow rather than Godine and that he may be willing to contemplate publication by a small press here.7 We now have the largest poetry list (especially new poetry and translations) in England (I mean, we produce a wider range of new titles than any of the larger houses). However, since we do only poetry and related work, we don’t have any money. We are good at getting the books around. I hope something will come of this.

      I hope that you – who seem to be featuring rather prominently in PNR as it develops because the new poets I most admire seem to have learned a great deal from you – will be able to send us work for PNR when your lean period is over.8 I eagerly look forward to Jack Straw’s Castle. I confessed to Clive Wilmer that I was, in the Gunn oeuvre, keenest on Touch and Moly (Moly fared so ill with the critics I hardly dared mention my enthusiasm). Clive waxed exceeding eloquent on the subject. Brian Cox and I have been teaching Moly in our seminars. Teaching. Well… reading. [the document ends here]


*


Thom Gunn was a frequent contributor to PN Review (getting on for thirty poems between 1979 and 1999, some of them shared with Threepenny Review) as well as reviews and some substantial essays. There was always a certain edge in his relations with the magazine and with the Press. It related sometimes to questions of tone which are, after all, an aspect of substance and Gunn had to call me out from time to time. As with most of my correspondents, an actual dialogue was in progress, an engagement over issues which mattered deeply to us, in different ways. Thus relations with Gunn were complicated by the close presence within PN Review of Donald Davie, a committed but critical advocate who knew Gunn’s Wintersian roots almost as well as Gunn himself; and while Gunn remained deeply in Winters’s debt he also came to find the Winters coterie narrow and narrowing. He also wanted to go part way with Davie on Pound but, as we have seen in Davie’s own letters, part way wasn’t quite far enough. He never engaged with Sisson’s work, distrusting a politics he erroneously presumed.

      About his own severe and generous politics, which evolved so exemplarily over time, there is little doubt. In 1994 he contributed a quatrain to PN Review called ‘Eastern Europe’ and dated February, 1990’:


‘The iron doors of history’ give at last,

And we walk through them from a rigid past.

Free! free! we can do anything we choose

– Eat at McDonald’s, persecute the Jews.


He added a telling note: ‘“Eastern Europe” is purely cerebral. Of course, people hate ideas without imagery these days, and I notice that by consequence epigrams are found repellent. But the Romans valued them, and so did Ben Jonson, and we should keep the form around for joking and cleverness and also for those occasions when pointed rudeness is appropriate.’ In a later note he chides himself for having ‘slipped into expressing the intentions I wanted to avoid’.


NOTES

  1. Yvor Winters (1900–68), American poet and literary critic, was Professor of English at Stanford University. In his first critical volume, Primitivism and Decadence (1937), Winters concluded that ‘experimental meter loses the rational frame which alone gives its variations the precision of true perception’, and in the foreword to In Defence of Reason, he defined a poem as ‘a statement in words about a human experience’. His awardwinning Collected Poems was published in 1952. Carcanet published his Collected Poems in 1978, introduced by Davie.
  2. Charles Monteith (1921–95) was a Director of Faber and Faber from 1954 to 1974.
  3. Dick Davis (b. 1945), poet, critic and translator, contributed regularly to PN Review for several years, and translated works by Natalia Ginzburg for Carcanet. He moved to Iran in 1970, but had to leave after the revolution in 1978. He is Emeritus Professor of Persian at Ohio State University. Clive Wilmer (b. 1945), poet, critic and lecturer, contributed poetry, articles and reviews regularly to PN Review from 1975 onwards. Carcanet published his New & Collected Poems in 2012, including a selection of his translations from several languages, notably Hungarian. He edited and annotated Thom Gunn’s Selected Poems (Faber and Faber, 2017). Robert Wells first approached Schmidt about his poems in 1976. See below, [p.239.]
  4. Shade Mariners (1970) was published by Gregory Spiro in Cambridge, with an introduction by Tony Tanner. Dick Davis’s first collection, In the Distance, was published by Anvil Press in 1975. Carcanet published his collected poems and selected translations, Love in Another Language, in 2017.
  5. Gunn did write about Winters in the 1980s, and his account of their relationship is collected in ‘On a Drying Hill: Yvor Winters’ in Shelf Life: Essays, Memoirs and an Interview, which is dedicated to Clive Wilmer (University of Michigan Press, 1995; Faber and Faber, 1996).
  6. Gareth Reeves (b.1947), poet and critic, worked closely with Carcanet in its early years as one of the founders of the press, along with Schmidt and Peter Jones. He spent some time at Stanford University on a Wallace Stegner Writing Fellowship. His first collection, Real Stories, was published by Carcanet in 1984; To Hell with Paradise: new and selected poems in 2012, and most recently Nuncle Music in 2013.
  7. Edgar Bowers (1924–2000) studied with Winters at Stanford. He published five collections of poetry in his lifetime and his Collected Poems was published in 1997 by Knopf; he was openly gay but this was not a focus of his poems. Some poems were published in PN Review in the 1980–90s, and his work was reviewed there. Living Together: new and selected poems appeared on the Carcanet list in 1977. David R. Godine (a distinguished Boston publisher) published Bowers’s third collection in 1973, and the two previous books were published by Alan Swallow (1915–66), whose Swallow Press in Colorado published authors including Allen Tate and Yvor Winters.
  8. Gunn contributed poems to nine issues of PN Review over the 1980s–90s; his first appearance was in PN Review 8 (July–September 1979). Concerns raised by two letters from 1981 that take issue with the attitude of the journal to homosexuality must have been satisfactorily answered. See Letters to an Editor, nos 189, 191.

THE YEAR IN BOOKS

      John Adlard (ed), The Fruit of that Forbidden Tree: Restoration poems, songs and jests on the subject of sensual love

      Cliff Ashby, The Dogs of Dewsbury: new poems

      Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Selected Poems, edited by Judith Higgens

      Anne, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Selected Poems, edited by Stevie Davies

      George Buchanan, Inside Traffic: new poems

      Thomas Campion, Ayres and Observations: selected poems, edited by Joan Hart

      John Cornford, Understand the Weapon, Understand the Wound: selected writings of John Cornford with some letters of Frances

      Cornford, edited by Jonathan Galassi

      Thomas Crawford (ed), Love, Labour and Liberty: the eighteenth century Scottish lyric

      Elizabeth Daryush, Collected Poems, introduction by Donald Davie

      Douglas Dunn (ed), Two Decades of Irish Writing: a critical survey

      Maurice Lindsay (ed), Modern Scottish Poetry: an anthology of the Scottish Renaissance 1925–1975

      Maurice Lindsay, Alexander Scott, Roderick Watson (eds), Scottish Poetry 9

      Paul Mills, North Carriageway

      Edwin Morgan, Rites of Passage: selected translations

      Robert Nye (ed), The English Sermon: 1750–1850: Volume 3

      Robert Nye, Divisions on a Ground

      Janos Pilinszky, Selected Poems, translated by Ted Hughes and Janos Csokits

      Edgell Rickword, Behind the Eyes: Collected Poems and Translations

      Anthony Rudolf, The Same River Twice

      Hans Dieter Schaefer, Strawberries in December and Other Poems, translated by Ewald Osers

      Michael Schmidt (ed), Ten English Poets: An Anthology

      Delmore Schwartz, What is to be Given: Selected Poems, edited by Douglas Dunn

      Martin Seymour-Smith (ed) The English Sermon: 1550–1650: Volume 1

      Jon Silkin, The Little Timekeeper

      C.H. Sisson, Anchises: Poems

      C.H. Sisson (ed), The English Sermon: 1650–1750: Volume 2

      Allen Tate, Memories and Essays: Old and New, 1926–1974

      Charles Tomlinson, In Black and White: the graphics of Charles

      Tomlinson, with three prose texts by Charles Tomlinson and an essay by Octavio Paz

      Henry Vaughan, Selected Poems of Henry Vaughan, edited by Robert

      B. Shaw

      Evgeny Vinokurov, Selected Poems, translated by Anthony Rudolf and Daniel Weissbort

      David Wright, To the Gods the Shades: new and collected poems