Homer in leather
Stephen Spender
COLLECTED POEMS by Thom Gunn Faber, £20, pp. 512 This is the poet's life which takes the reader from his youth in London to the years of his maturity, spent mostly in California.
In the first poem here the poet describes himself as wounded, a patient whose mind `constantly returned to Troy' where he has been friend of the dead Patroclus. The Homeric metaphor persists throughout his poetry so that 18 years later, in 1971, the section entitled 'Moly', largely concerned with hallucinatory drugs, is preceded by an epigraph in which the narrator meets Her- mes who, pulling it from the ground, rec- ommends to him a herb called by that name.
Gunn's poetry is classical, objective anti- Romantic. Modern heroes are seen as products of the legendary or historic past. In a poem about Claus von Stauffenberg (of the bomb plot on Hitler, 1944) the reader is told that 'the maimed young Colonel' Takes lessons from the past, to detonate/ A bomb that Brutus rendered possible.' The lesson out of Roman history here seems strained, superfluous, equating Julius Caesar with Hitler, and von Stauf- fenberg — whose bomb, tragically, did not attain its purpose of assassinating a tyrant viler, surely, than Caesar with Brutus. This is poetry of the external will set in opposition to interior subjectivity. The 'I, of Gunn's poetry sees himself as a 'he among others, often athletic young Califor- nians: the unstated difference between him and those others being that he is, like the narrator of an epic who is an invisible pres- ence among heroes, a poet. With one or two exceptions — when he addresses fellow poets (Yvor Winters, his mentor, early on, and, much later, his fellow Californian, Robert Duncan) — he meets friends on the level of shared external experience, physi- cal and perhaps mental and moral, rather in the manner of a later, more sophisticat- ed, Walt Whitman.
The uniform worn by motor-cyclists who are heroes, as well as by the poet himself, is celebrated as leather, that of the toughs of history and habitués of San Francisco bars.
One may have misgivings about Thom Gunn's kind of classicism, but three things save it from disguised self-indulgence. One is the control observed within the poetry itself, whether the poet is writing in strict forms, or in syllabics, or in several varieties of free verse. The second is that he is with- out sentimentality about his heroes. They are seen and even loved with a very cool eye, admired because they are active and not passive, but their action may not be admirable. There is a whole gallery of closely observed portraits of characters here, drop-outs, street-walkers, pick-ups, drunks and beggars — brilliantly observed. The third thing is that in several poems Gunn beautifully describes the landscape of California. In one of the best poems here, 'The Geysers', set in Sonoma County, California, he succeeds in evoking a land- scape where there is, or was, an old bath house partly camped out in by him and some friends, young men and women, where nature seems to envelope them with- in what seems the landscape's humanity: 'my blood is yours, the hands that tear accept.'
Classicism implies setting up a hierarchy of the senses, the eye exalted above all others, and strictly observing techniques in poems that seem sculptural artefacts. Inevitably, though, since we do not live in a classical era, Romanticism creeps in, because, as with the early poetry of Eliot, the self-styled classicist is romantic about his vision of classicism. The great success of one of Gunn's most famous and beautiful poems, 'My Sad Captains', lies in its being a poem of high romanticism about the idea of the classical heroes:
True, they are not at rest yet, but now that they are indeed apart, winnowed from failures, they withdraw to an orbit and turn with disinterested hard energy, like the stars.
Underlying this lifetime transformed into poetry is an epic which ends with over- whelming catastrophe — Aids. Some of the best poems here are in the last section of the book recording that catastrophe as it affects his friends. Of course, this is an unmitigated disaster caused by events external to the poetry: but it does have the effect of rounding off Gunn's oeuvre by bringing it close to the individual con- fronting death, courageous in a particular time and place, room, house and street, real without having to be part of a legend going back to Homer. These are among the best poems in this volume.
Previous page
