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It was 16 June 2004. I had done a reading with Patrick McGrath in a bookshop called Kepler’s in Menlo Park, about an hour away from San Francisco.

In the Bay Area, because of the jagged configuration of land and ocean and bay and freeway, it is often hard to know whether you have been moving due north or due south or some indirect direction in between. As we left the shop in the early evening, I discovered to my surprise that we were actually close to Stanford University.

Soon, at a small drinks party in a house near the campus, I found myself talking to a large, good-humoured Stanford professor about poetry.

I had heard his name when we were introduced, but it had not struck me that this Ken Fields, the man standing in front of me, could be the same as the Kenneth Fields who had edited a book with the critic Yvor Winters called ‘Quest for Reality: An Anthology of Short Poems in English.’ This book had first appeared in 1969.

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Some time early in 1973, at the age of eighteen, I had found ‘Quest for Reality’ in the library at the UCD. In a series of lectures on the short poem in the sixteenth century, Denis Donoghue had alluded to Yvor Winters (1900-1968), who had written about poets such as Fulke Greville and Michael Drayton and Thomas Campion, poets of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century who were not the famous ones. But I am not sure he had mentioned this particular book which was an effort to reshape the entire canon of English poetry.

It must have seemed an eccentric project even at the time.

I am the only person I know who actually treasures this book and keeps it close at all times. Or at least I thought I was until I found of a review on www.amazon.com from 2000 by a man called Ben Kilpela: ‘Yvor Winters (1900-1968) decided to illustrate by example what he thought are the greatest poems ever written in English. So here they reside, 185 of them. A few, very few, will be well known to readers of poetry; most are puzzlingly obscure. All but a handful (in my view) are so great that it takes one's breath away to read them. Reading them almost makes for mystical experiences. Among the poems that the common critics have missed but Winters found and championed to his dying day are [Ben] Jonson's "To Heaven", [George] Herbert's "Church Monuments", [Jones] Very's "Thy Brother's Blood", [Yvor] Winters's own "To the Holy Spirit", and [Edgar] Bowers's "The Astronomers of Mont Blanc". There are many, many more, but these five are probably the greatest of the greats. This is, simply put, the greatest book of poetry ever published in English. If you love poetry, you must find or own a copy.’

As far as I know, the book was never re-printed. Kilpela also writes in his amazon review about Kenneth Field’s introduction: ‘The book contains an excellent introductory essay by a Winters student, Kenneth Fields, who lays out the principles of selection briefly and incisively. In itself, that essay is one of the best introductions to poetry ever written and alone will be worth all the effort you make in finding this out-of-print book.’

I asked Ken Fields some questions about Winters; we spoke about a few poems that Winters had favoured and then about his dislike for most of the best-known poems by Yeats. Winters could never understand how any poet could write lines like: ‘unless/ Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing.’ How could a soul claps its hands? Or even: how could a soul sing? How would you know it was louder?

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Aged eighteen and nineteen, I had taken from Winters what I needed and what I did not find anywhere else: the idea that phrases and sentences should say something that is true as much as this is possible.

I wonder if all of us are susceptible once or twice – maybe in our late teens or early twenties – to a new idea, a fresh way of thinking about something, an approach.

Perhaps if it had been some other critic, things might have been different. Yvor Winters was dogmatic, and I must have found that useful. His best writing was about poetry. He believed in what we might call a poetry of statement, that poetic form served to order feeling or register disorder in a kind of order. 

He believed that a poem should not reflect an experience or describe an experience, but rather that it should be in itself an experience, a kind of energy, as vital as feeling.

He formulated this in a house near Palo Alto, close to the Stanford campus, in a time before the valley was silicon.

*

In 1954, a young English poet called Thom Gunn came to Stanford to study with Winters. At that time, Gunn had merely seen some of the East Coast of America.

Winters wrote to him: ‘You will like the west the better, I suppose, for having seen the worst the first…In California the earth is red on the western slope of the Sierras, and when you get down into the great valley, the grass will be dead and the air will be yellow. I find that I cannot endure to be far from the yellow air for very long. It is like gold to airy thinness beat, but it smells better.’

In Winters’s essays, he set out to make a case against ornament, against fancy, against metaphor almost, against display in favour of what might seem plain and direct, but in favour also of rhythm both buried and then suddenly apparent, in favour of accuracy.

*

More than a decade after Yvor Winters’ death, Thom Gunn wrote an essay about him. (He had earlier written a poem about Winters.) He described Yvor Winters in the classroom at Stanford: ‘His love, his passion for poetry showed clearly enough in his classes. More than one student commented on the fact that in speaking of some poem or passage he particularly admired he was apt to use the uncharacteristic word “haunting”. He used it because his mind was literally haunted by certain bits of poetry, of which the power was greater than the intelligence could possibly explain.’

Winters was formidable. ‘He was not a bully,’ Gunn wrote, ‘though he did not suffer fools gladly. He certainly believed that he had come as close to a description of what poetry is and can be, and of the way it works, as is possible.’

For a few years after his arrival in California until he found better things to do in San Francisco, Gunn realized that he had a lot to learn from Winters. ‘If you are given the chance,’ he wrote, ‘of going to school under a man possessing an extraordinary mind, who has attempted to completely assess the consequences of all his assumptions, you would be a fool not to take advantage of it, even if the risk were of ending up a slavish follower.’

*

On 18 July, the first biography of Thom Gunn, and likely the definitive one, will be published in Ireland and the UK. (It appears on June 18 in US.) It is called ‘A Cool Queer Life’ and is written by Michael Nott who was also one of the editors of Thom Gunn’s Letters that came out three years ago. The book is 530 pages long, with almost two hundred pages more for endnotes and the index.

The biography begins with the suicide of Gunn’s mother when Gunn was fifteen and his brother Ander was twelve. They were living in London. They found their mother, who had separated from their father some years before, on the morning of December 29 1944. She had gassed herself.

After their mother’s death, Gunn and his brother wanted to live with their aunts in a house called Covey Hall rather than with their father. ‘We are at Covey Hall now,’ Gunn wrote in his diary, ‘though father wanted us to stay at his horrible house and with his horrible wife. He wants to live with us. Mother prophesied that he would if she should die.’

How this early loss mattered to Gunn is one of the themes of this biography. Gunn later wrote that ‘at 14 I was made to feel too much for my age and have become rather unequipped for deep emotion as a result.’ In 1968, he had ‘a very strange dream where I found my mother dead. I thought, callously, “Oh no, not again. I think I’ll let somebody else find her body this time.”’

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Nott’s book tells the fascinating and complex story of Thom Gunn’s relationship with Mike Kitay. They met in 1952 when Kitay came from America to Cambridge where Gunn was studying. Kitay was twenty-one; Thomas Gunn was twenty-three. Gunn then followed Kitay to America. They lived together mainly in San Francisco until Gunn’s death more than fifty years later. At the beginning, they were lovers. Later, they shared a house and were constant companions. They had other partners, other lovers. Kitay tended towards monogamy. Thom Gunn grew increasingly wild as the years went on.

Nott’s book is one of the best versions of a gay relationship conducted over this half century. But there is another matter at the heart of the biography that is new to me or that read like a small undercurrent in other biographies of poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century – poets such as Philip Larkin and Elizabeth Bishop.

At the beginning, poems came easily to Thom Gunn, or so it seems. But eventually the fact that he was not writing, not producing, all the time became a preoccupation, perhaps even a governing anxiety. Worrying about not writing poems came for Gunn, as it did for Philip Larkin and for Elizabeth Bishop, in waves and it never retreated.

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A short poem takes two days: that might actually be a true statement. The first day is when something is written down that has enough rhythm, enough inner force, or even a good beginning, or something that at least can start you off.

That then stays stored for a length of time – it could be as long as a year, even more.

Then the poet looks at that very first draft again. Adds a few words, erases some lines. Maybe just that. And then each day a bit more or less. And then one day, for no apparent reason, the poem seems to come right, or move towards that state. It doesn’t really matter whether the poet works for an hour getting it right, or much more. Something seemed to happen on that day in that room that could not happen on any other day or in any other room.

In 1985, Thom Gunn considered this process: ‘Sometimes all that will survive from the original version [of a poem] will be just a few phrases in the general scheme of the thing. One of the exciting things about writing for me is the process of exploration. And often for me the exploration takes place in successive drafts, with surprises along the way. Often the poem you end with is going to be different from, and better than, the first draft or your first notion of the poem. Sometimes I’ll write a poem and realize that a quarter of it near the end is the real poem; the rest of it was just preliminaries.’

The problem is that no one can predict when this realization takes place. The good day might appear to come, but then the poet realizes that the signals were false, the first draft is no use, or that the bright useful work only seemed like that and brought nothing except false feelings forcing their way into false rhythm and false form.

What if the good days were gone and were never to return? What would it be like then?  (For the last ten years of his life – he died at 63 – Philip Larkin, for example, completed only one or two poems.)

*

Having finished his poem ‘On the Move’ in 1956 (when he was twenty-seven) Thom Gunn wrote ‘nothing – not a damn thing except revisions’ over the next while.’ He made serious jokes about it: ‘Not doing anything,’ he wrote to a friend, ‘makes me morose, ungrateful, arrogant, difficult to live with, etc. (Whereas working hard makes me morose, ungrateful, arrogant, and difficult to live with.)’

To energise the poem, Gunn played with form, varying the systems. In 1959, he began to work with syllabics. Instead of a line that depended on a beat – an iambic beat, for example – or instead of a line that was free of any metrical system, syllabics merely counted the syllables so that each line would have seven, say, syllables, or nine, and that would be the rhythmic form. Of these poems by Gunn, the most successful is probably ‘Considering the Snail.’

Gunn, Nott writes, found the seven-syllable line used in poems such as ‘Considering the Snail’ ‘full of very exciting possibilities.’ Whereas strict metre for Gunn evoked ‘rather taut emotion, a rather clenched kind of emotion’, syllabics lent themselves, Gunn wrote, to ‘the casual perception.’ He composed for himself a letter of intent: ‘The next poems must be personal, flat, almost casual. The form of syllabics is all that will give them tightness – a form all but invisible to the reader, but for me the difference between order & disorder.’

Later, in the 1980s, he wrote that he wanted to write ‘ten poems a year…most of them in metre, since in the metrical poems I seem to get deeper into my feelings & thoughts about things and make a solider construction out of them.’

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The subject of not writing came up again and again in Gunn’s letters. At the end of 1975, not having written a poem since April, he wrote to his brother: ‘Dry periods seem to be necessary to me, like a kind of pregnancy for the fertile periods.’

(Towards the end of her life, Louise Glück wrote: ‘The periods of blankness and silence are desolating. But tell yourself the well is filling up (it is). At the end of silence something will have shifted, your work changed. I believe this passionately. I think everything good in my own work I owe to endurance.’)

In his letter to his brother, Gunn added: ‘But then writing also seems to be a necessary part of the way I live, when I write I really start to understand things and connect different things. If something matters enough it always gets into my poetry sooner or later.’ And then he added: ‘Maybe one day I’ll manage to write a poem about Mother, a subject that has always defeated me.’ (He would not write a poem about the death of his mother until ‘The Gas-Poker’, written in 1987.)

Of this fallow period in the late 1970s when he entertained the possibility that ‘maybe there was no more poetry to come from me’, Gunn wrote to Ted Hughes: ‘I learned nothing from the experience except that I have become very dependent on the process of writing poetry and that it will probably always return to me, but I learned nothing, I mean, about how to deal with the dry spells, or about what brings them and what ends them.’

He wondered if publishing a book of poems was inimical to the creation of new poems. In 1984, two years after the publication of his book ‘The Passages of Joy’, he wrote to the critic Tony Tanner to say that he had settled ‘on an arbitrary date – 1992 – for the publication of my next book. By that time, in all probability, I will have completed at least one and a half books, so possibly with half of an unpublished book still in my drawer I won’t feel that drained sense of having nothing left to give anyone in 1992. I will have something left – half a book.’

The book of poems Gunn published in 1992 was ‘The Man with Night Sweats’. The half a book he imagined became a whole book in time and was published as ‘Boss Cupid’ in 2000, four years before his death.

Colm Tóibín (May 2024)