At the Barriers

by Weiner, Joshua

• ISBN13: 9780226890449
• ISBN10: 0226890449
• eBook ISBN(s): 9780226890371
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-07-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr
• More Book Details

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career from his youth in 1930s Britain to his final years in California, from his earliest publications to his later unpublished notebooks, bringing together some of the most important poet-critics from both sides of the Atlantic to assess his oeuvre.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 at the University of Maryland, College Park, and 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. He lives in Washington,  D.C. 
 

 

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	p. xi
List of Abbreviations	p. xiii
Introduction	p. 1
In England
All That You Praise I Take: A Glimpse of the Young Thom Gunn	p. 11
Young Gunn: Coming Out Fighting	p. 19
Existentialism and Homosexuality in Gunn's Early Poetry	p. 35
Gunn, Shakespeare, and the Elizabethans	p. 45
Across the Water
Thom Gunn: The Plain Style and the City	p. 71
Thom Gunn and Anglo-American Modernism	p. 85
From Ladd's Hill to Land's End (and Back Again): Narrative, Rhythm, and the Transatlantic Occasions of "Misanthropos"	p. 105
Two Versions of "Meat"	p. 127
Gunn's "Meat": Notations on Craft	p. 129
In America
Summation and Chthonic Power	p. 135
Our Dionysian Experiment: Three Theses on the Poetry of Thom Gunn	p. 181
Of The World
Thom Gunn's New Jerusalem	p. 241
Domains of Ecstasy	p. 257
Considering "Considering the Snail"	p. 269
Thom Gunn's "Duncan"	p. 277
Coda: Thom Gunn, Inside and Outside	p. 287
Notes	p. 293
List of Contributors	p. 319
Index of Names	p. 323
Table of Contents provided by Ingram. All Rights Reserved.