New Literary History

Abstract:

Donald davie, a serious man, had serious doubts, but his friend Thom Gunn kept assuring him that contemporary poetry could be at once really gay and really traditional. Gunn thought so partly because several major poets who helped forge the tradition as he and Davie knew it, poets such as Christopher Marlowe and Walt Whitman, were themselves gay.1 He also thought so, as his recently published letters confirm, because of his counterintuitive conviction that historical poetic techniques can enhance "improvisatory and up-to-date subject matter."2 Free verse caught the sensation of modern freedom but sometimes fell short in reflecting on it or thinking through it. Gunn, who moved from Cambridge to California in 1954, maintained that poets seeking to represent a queer experience or unconventional setting might be better off relying on the time-tested shaping power of established meters and rhymes. Formal control could then serve as both a defining part of the exploration—an order within freedom—and a device for assessing it, as though from the outside. This inside-and-out defense of traditional form is one he adopted from his Stanford teacher Yvor Winters, for whom poetry's formal discipline (as Gunn puts it) "does not reject experience" but offers "a means of simultaneously conveying it, in all its variety, and evaluating it."3 Experience was the rub for Donald Davie, who in 1982 claimed that his friend's poetry had cut itself off from the literary past by embracing queer content.4 Gunn had good reason to disagree. The very sequence in which he came out in his verse, far from marking a clean break with Winters and traditional form, attests to his ongoing involvement with them. That coming-out sequence takes place in couplets that deserve to be called Popean. But they're Popean in a specific sense, defined not just by regular meter and rhyme but especially by line-ending punctuation that allows enjambment to make room for intimacy.