الفهرس 
autobiographical sketch and the originsof the movementOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Abstract
In many critical reviews of Thom Gunn’s work, the later poetry is usually read as
inferior to the earlier. The notoriously varied body of his work seems to me to make on
coherence ifhe is read as, from the start, a man in quest for a personal identity and meaning
in a world where the traditional supports for life are being questioned. It is a quest which has
been stated in his earlier poetry and enacted in his later poetry.
This study identifies six distinct personas in Gunn’s poetic development: the
”embattled” stance of Fighting Terms (1954), ”a life of action and a life of pose” in The
Sense of Movement (1957), the ”divided self’ of My Sad Captains (1961), the striving for
”contact” with human kind and nature in Touch (1967), the ”widening sympathies” of Moly
(1971) and Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), and ultimately to the state of ”communion with the
self and the community” in The Passages of Joy (1982) and The Man with Night Sweats
(1992).
This work explores Gunn’s formal and metrical development as well. It traces
Gunn’s subtle movement from a severe to a lightly mitigated classicism, from an authority
grounded in high standards and traditional norms, through syllabics and free verse, ultimately
to a stance no less classical but humanized by compassion. It aligns Gunn’s free verse with
America, with risk, with freedom from old-world restraints and myths of innocence and the
\,,
,
transcendence of time, aJId G=’ s more formal verse with the traditional European aesthetic
models, and (by extensioo) to an intimation of determinism and the forces of history. The
study proves that Gunn is one of the most prominent poets of the second half of the twentieth
century, who deserves 10 be seen as one in a long and distinguished line of modern poets
whom the term ”Anglo-American” is perfectly proper distinction. .