The Letters of Thom Gunn
Faber, $79.99 hb, 734 pp
Letter collection
The New Jerusalem
Filtering experience through the grid of the finite
by Ian Dickson •
Of the major Anglo-American poets of the previous century, none was more transformed, at least on the surface, by the journey across the Atlantic than Thom Gunn (1929–2004). Travelling in the opposite direction, T.S. Eliot found echoes of his mid-Western emotional repression and discreet anti-Semitism in the England of his era, while W.H. Auden, who carried his world with him, was only mildly affected by his time in America.
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