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.
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
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
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’.
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