Thom Gunn began to love writing from an early age. He grew up in England, where homosexuality was uncommon and being gay made Gunn feel as if he were an outsider. After moving to California, Gunn found a sense of community and happiness, until the AIDS epidemic struck. Thom Gunn’s life consisted of moments of liberation mixed with moments of sadness. His experiences are reflected through his poems. Thom Gunn, a notable San Francisco resident who enjoyed drugs, cooking, gardening, and cats, did not hesitate to write down what he was thinking in his poems. His works are notorious for their homosexual theme. Gunn was an advocate of freedom and equality, which later lead him to his openly homosexual poetry and the theory of communal love. He describes many situations in his poems as “times of joy.” In these periods, the imagination could range freely, allowing him to express himself.
Born Thomson William Gunn, this Anglo-American poet seemed to have a love of writing from an early point on, using his thoughts on life to give him a common theme of love. On August 29, 1929, Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, England to father Bert Gunn (Poetry Foundation). He was the older son of two journalists who divorced when the poet was only ten years old. His mother tragically committed suicide during Gunn’s teenage years; however, before her death, his mother had inspired a deep love of reading and writing in young Thom, including the writings of Marlowe, Keats, Milton, and Tennyson, as well as several prose writers (Poets.org). Gunn also began to experience the first signs of his homosexuality during this period, but was confused about whether it was stress from the divorce and loss of a parent, or if it was something else that would later ...
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my wonderful English teacher,mmmmmm mmmm, along with our amazing librarian, mmmmm mmmml, for helping me research and edit my paper. Without their help I would not have been able to even start this project, let alone finish it.
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Homosexuality remained illegal in most parts of America until the 1960s, but Ginsberg refused to equate his Gay identity with criminality. He wrote about his homosexuality in almost every poem that he wrote, most specifically in ‘Many Loves’ (1956) and ‘Please Master’ (1968), his paeans to his errant lover Neal Cassady. Ginsberg’s poems are full of explicit sexual detail and scatological humour, but the inclusion of such details should not be interpreted as a childish attempt to incense the prudish and the square.
Masson, Davis. Essays Biographical and Critical: Chiefly on English Poets. La Vergne, Tennessee: Lightning Source, Inc., 2007.
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
First and foremost I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my parents, for their constant support and always enabling me to stay out late due to working on this paper. My brother, and sister, whom at times interfered while writing this paper, but have given me their full support and help at all times.
Holbrook, David. Llareggub Revisted: Dylan Thomas and the State of Modern Poetry. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1965. 100-101.
Denise Levertov chose to write about things that were not readily seen by others. She wrote her poems in free verse and she paced her writing to lead to a climax that contrasted the intensity of her poems. Her artistic voice can be examined in her poem The Ache of Marriage.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985.” New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.
During the early seventeenth century, poets were able to mourn the loss of a child publicly by writing elegies, or poems to lament the deceased. Katherine Philips and Ben Jonson were two poets who wrote the popular poems “On the Death of My Dearest Child, Hector Philips”, “On My First Son”, and “On My First Daughter” respectively. Although Philips and Jonson’s elegies contain obvious similarities, the differences between “On the Death of My Dearest Child” and “On My First Son” specifically are pronounced. The emotions displayed in the elegies are very distinct when considering the sex of the poet. The grief shown by a mother and father is a major theme when comparing the approach of mourning in the two elegies.
Dylan Thomas was born in 1914 of intellectual parents both being literature professors. Long before he could read, his father would recite poetry from classic authors. Many of his poems can be traced to the illustrated style of D.H Lawrence. The imagery he provides of disparity and death in many of his poems. In the span of Dylan’s life, he witnessed both Great Wars. The first war may have been the main topic of discussion by his parents at childhood. And later at service in the air defense over London. Because of his determined health Thomas was not able to enroll in an active combat role during World War II. Thomas life’s experiences played a major role in influencing his writing...