Thom Gunn

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Thomson ("Thom") William Gunn (born August 29, 1929 in Gravesend , Kent , Great Britain ; † April 25, 2004 in San Francisco , USA ) was a British poet and university teacher.

Life

Thom Gunn's parents were journalists. When he was nine years old, they divorced. The mother committed suicide six years later.

After studying English literature at Trinity College in Cambridge , from which he graduated with an academic degree in 1953, he lived in the USA from 1954 and taught from 1958 to 1966 and from 1973 to 1990 at the University of California ( Berkeley ). Together with Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis , he co-founded the group The Movement . The British poet was one of the most important contemporary poets and wrote over 30 volumes of poetry and books.

Thom Gunn died in 2004 at the age of 74 from complications from a heart attack .

Work and literary significance

Already his first volume of poetry, Fighting Terms (1954), attracted the critic's attention: Gunn's poetry, in which experiences and concrete observations are reproduced in a hard, direct and metrically concentrated form, was influenced by the influential style of TS Eliot and turned away from a group of modern poets who had laid out their poetic credo in The New Apocalypse (1939) (among them GS Fraser, Nicholas Moore and Norman MacCaig). Rather, Gunn was counted among a group of poets who became known in England in the mid-1950s as The Movement and whose "Manifesto" included the anthology New Lines published by Robert Conquest .

Gunn's publications extend to the present day, his work has many facets in addition to utopian depictions, social-historical aspects and destructive effects on reality; but in the depictions of everyday life within the protest movement of the 1960s, especially in the form of the casual American way of life , Gunn expressed the attitude of the younger generation ( Beat Generation ). Many poems deal with current pop music, motorcycling, aspects of drug addiction and sexuality. Oliver Sacks is one of the writers he shaped .

Works

  • Fighting Terms (1954)
  • The Sense of Movement (1957)
  • My Sad Captains (1961)
  • Touch (1967)
  • Moly (1971)
  • To the Air (1974)
  • Jack Straw's Castle (1976)
  • The Passages of Joy (1982)
  • The Man with Night Sweats (1992)
  • Boss Cupid (2000)

Awards

literature

  • Jack WC Hagstrom and George Bixby, Thom Gunn: A Bibliography 1940-78 (London: Rota, 1979).
  • Neil Powell, "The Abstract Joy: Thom Gunn's Early Poetry," in: Critical Quarterly, 13 (Autumn 1971), pp. 219-227.
  • Blake Morrison, The Movement: English Poetry and Fiction of the 1950s. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980).
  • Ingrid Rückert, "The touch of sympathy". Philip Larkin and Thom Gunn: 2 contributions to contemporary English poetry. (Heidelberg: Winter, 1982). ISBN 3-533-03159-4 , ISBN 3-533-03160-8 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hannes Stein: The writer and neurologist Oliver Sacks is dead. In: welt.de . August 30, 2015, accessed October 7, 2018 .
personal data
SURNAME Gunn, Thom
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Gunn, Thomson William (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION British poet and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH August 29, 1929
PLACE OF BIRTH Gravesend
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 2004
Place of death San Francisco