At the Barriers

by Weiner, Joshua

• ISBN13: 9780226890432
• ISBN10: 0226890430
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2009-07-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Maverick gay poetic icon Thom Gunn (19292004) and his body of work have long dared the British and American poetry establishments either to claim or disavow him. To critics in the UK and US alike, Gunn demonstrated that formal poetry could successfully include new speech rhythms and open forms and that experimental styles could still maintain technical and intellectual rigor. Along the way, Gunn's verse captured the social upheavals of the 1960s, the existential possibilities of the late twentieth century, and the tumult of post-Stonewall gay culture. The first book-length study of this major poet,At the Barrierssurveys Gunn's career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre. This landmark volume traces how Gunn, in both his life and his writings, pushed at boundaries of different kinds, be they geographic, sexual, or poetic.At the Barrierswill solidify Gunn's rightful place in the pantheon of Anglo-American letters.

Author Biography

Joshua Weiner is associate professor of English and the director of the English Honors Program at the University of Maryland. He is the author of two books of poetry, The World’s Room and From the Book of Giants, both published by the University of Chicago Press.

 

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

In England

All That You Praise I Take: A Glimpse of the Young Thom Gunn

Coming Out Fighting

Existentialism and Homosexuality in Gunn’s Early Poetry

Across the Water

The Plain Style and the City

From Ladd’s Hill to Land’s End (and Back Again): Narrative, Rhythm, and the Transatlantic Occasions of “Misanthropos”

Two Versions of “Meat”

Gunn’s “Meat”: Notations on Craft

In America

Summation and Chthonic Power

Our Dionysian Experiment: Three Theses on the Poetry of Thom Gunn 0

Of the World

Thom Gunn’s New Jerusalem

Domains of Ecstasy

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