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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. . |