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Biography of Thom Gunn
Name: Thom Gunn
Birth Date: August 29, 1929
Death Date: N/A
Place of Birth: Gravesend, England
Nationality: English
Gender: Male
Occupations: poet, teacher
Thom Gunn
For more than 40 years, award-winning poet Thom Gunn (born 1929) has concentrated on traditional form and, in contrast, on modern themes like LSD, panhandlers, and homosexuality. Born in England, he has spent most of his life in America, writing in traditional verse about American issues and subjects.Thom Gunn was born Thomas William Gunn in Gravesend, England. His father, Herbert Smith, and his mother, Ann Charlotte Thompson Gunn, were both journalists; they divorced when Gunn was nine. Gunn traveled with his father, moving from town to town, and served in the British Army for two years, from 1948 to 1950. After serving in the army, Gunn lived in Paris for a year, beginning to write there, then moved to Trinity College at Cambridge, where he focused seriously on writing poetry.California Liberated StyleGunn published his first collection of poems, Fighting Terms, in 1954, the same year he began graduate study at Stanford University with …showed first 150 words…
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…showed last 150 words…same time having enough wry self-knowledge to undercut that consolation." And Publishers Weekly opined that Gunn "avoids both naive realism and modernist self-referentiality." Most remarkable about this collection of poetry is the "care, both in the making of the poem and in the concern for people." He addresses both the city of San Francisco and its citizens with "an intelligence and a warmth superior to those of virtually any other gay poet," observed Booklist. The people who inhabit Gunn's poems, however, are a part of the world he seeks to subvert. In the Los Angeles Times Book Review, poet Donald Hall wrote that he did "not find [Gunn] pledging allegiance to anything except his own alert, unforgiving, skeptical independence." Further Reading Contemporary Authors, New Revisions, Volume 33, Gale 1991.Booklist,April 15, 1994, p. 1503.New York Times Book Review, November 15, 1992; May 29, 1994.Poetry, February 1995, p. 289.Publishers Weekly, February 28, 1994, p. 77.San Francisco Chronicle, April 8, 1996, p.D1.
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