“I am at my best-in my writing, anyway-when I am trying to reconcile opposites,” he wrote in 1968. Understatement, subtlety, composure-these are the hallmarks of Gunn’s poetry, but so, too, are discreet intensity and controlled musicality. As the poet Tom Sleigh has suggested, one source of Gunn’s deep originality is the connections he makes between “eroticism, pleasure, and domestic stability.” Consider, for example, these lines from Gunn’s “ The Hug,” likely addressed to his longtime partner, Mike Kitay: All three were abundant in Gunn’s San Francisco home, where he lived for more than 30 years with various housemates and a rotating menagerie of cats and dogs. Gunn was a student of Elizabethan stalwarts John Donne, Ben Jonson, and Fulke Greville, and he brought to his classical forms a sensibility refined through queerness, hallucinogenics, and hippie communalism. Precocity gave way to an occasionally muddled mid-career, and then to the majesties of The Man With Night Sweats, his AIDS-era elegies, and Boss Cupid, his wry final book. His acclaimed debut, Fighting Terms, appeared when he was 24. Gunn has gone in and out of fashion over the years. When the 74-year-old poet died of “acute polysubstance abuse” in 2004, there was a sense of delayed martyrdom, as if the tragedies he’d experienced-his mother’s early death, the catastrophe of AIDS-had taken an unusually long time to exact their cost. Both fancied themselves exemplars of a live-fast-die-young credo that was self-fulfilling in Vicious’s case but jokily theoretical in Gunn’s. Both had fatal appetites for booze and drugs. Both were disaffected Englishmen who jeered at the stuffy rituals and pomposity of their homeland. ![]() ![]() Middle-aged when the Sex Pistols appeared in the 1970s, Gunn nonetheless felt a rapport with the young enfant terrible of punk rock. ![]() In 1980, the poet Thom Gunn hung a poster of Sid Vicious in his workroom.
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