About Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn in Gravesend on August 29, 1929, died April 25, 2004, was an Anglo-American poet and university teacher, known both for his first poems published in England where he is associated wamong a circle of poets that became known in England in the mid-1950s as The Movement, that to his last poems published in the United States. After settling in San Francisco and coming out as gay, Gunn wrote about homosexuality, particularly in The Man With Night Sweats in 1992, drugs, sex, subjects familiar to his writing style. life. He has won numerous literary awards. In 1954, He published his first collection, Fighting Terms, of which John Press wrote: This is one of the few collections of post-war poetry that all amateurs should obtain and read. This volume already drew the attention of critics: Gunn had drawn from the influential style of T. S. Eliot with his poetry, in which experiences and concrete observations are presented in a hard, direct and metrically concentrated form and turned away from a group of modern poets (among them G. S. Fraser, Nicholas Moore or Norman MacCaig) who had set out their poetic credo in The New Apocalypse (1939).Gunn's publications extend to the present day, his work has many facets in addition to utopian depictions, socio-historical aspects and destructive effects of reality; but in the representations of everyday life within the protest movement of the 1960s, especially in the form of the informal American way of life, Gunn expressed the attitude towards life of the younger generation (Beat Generation). Many poems deal with current pop music, motorcycling, aspects of drug addiction and sexuality. Among the writers he influenced is Oliver Sacks.
In 1954, Gunn emigrated to the United States to teach at Stanford University. Gunn taught at the University of California, Berkeley from 1958 to 1966 and again from 1973 to 1990.
He died in 2004 of an overdose at his Haight-Ashbury home in San Francisco, where he had lived since 1960.
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