Word: gunn
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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WGBH, Boston's educational TV station, may refuse the use of Loeb Drama Center's experimental theatre this summer, Hartford N. Gunn, Jr. '48, General Manager of WGBH, said yesterday...
With his first two volumes, Fighting Terms and The Sense of Movement, Mr. Gunn became famous in England (though not, to our disgrace, in his adopted America) for toughness of diction, the swiftness and healthy outrageousness of his far-reaching, quasi-"metaphysical" conceits, and the organic tightness of his stanzaic units. In My Sad Captains epigrammatic audacity has largely given way to a sustained unity of impression. There is less concern with patterened formality here; the use of false- and half-rhyming, for example, hase become so ubiquitous that Mr. Gunn's "schemes" are mainly of assonance...
Those readers who insist upon filing contemporary writers to the pigeonhole of a convenient tradition will have no difficulty in detecting the intellectual habits of the school of Donne in such poems as "The Value of Gold." To expand categories slightly, Mr. Gunn's whole milieu resembles that early-seventeenth-century world of religious nightmare, alchemical daydream, and academic short-circuit, in which an inherited logic grinned at itself and morbidity became bumptious. In one of the 1954 poems, "A Mirror for Poets," Mr. Gunn described that age, so obviously like our own as to make the comparison banal...
...probably not sufficient to relate Mr. Gunn's heroes to the convention of the "broken Coriolanus," or more contemporaneously and thus more deceptively, that of the cardiac Sisyphus. The quality of "starriness" central to the title poem and one other, entitled "Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt," is that "disinterested, hard energy" by which Nobody holds Nothing-at-all at bay. Mr. Auden's "ironic points of light" flashed out among a decimated signal corps on the last battlefield of love; Mr. Gunn's stars are self-sufficient. Where Donne tossed and scrambeld known quantities and academically-sanctioned categories, where Shakespeare talked...
...final importance of Mr. Gunn's work lies in what it preserves from the little that is left to a self-parodying culture and an exploited language. The artistic temperament revealed by the best of these poems is that of a compassionate Webster, a Byron without pose. My Sad Captains should be bought by anyone who understands and cares about the rawest, oldest, and bravest tradition of them...