Thom Gunn, a transplanted British poet identified with the San Francisco scene and the California liberated style, died on Sunday night at his home in San Francisco, his adopted hometown. He was 74. His death was announced by his companion of 52 years, Mike Kitay.
Acclaimed as one of the most promising young poets of postwar Britain, Mr. Gunn found his own voice after he migrated to California in the 1950's and established himself in San Francisco, his home for the rest of his life. There, he wedded traditional form to unorthodox themes like LSD, panhandling and homosexuality. He experimented with free verse and syllabic stanzas. In doing so he evolved from British tradition and European existentialism to embrace the relaxed ways of the California counterculture.
Born and educated in England, he was grouped as a young man at Cambridge in the 1950's with a generation of writers, notably Philip Larkin, known as the Movement. Their verse was celebrated for its dry, skeptical rejection of what they saw as rhymed grandiosity. He later studied at Stanford with the poetic rationalist Yvor Winters. By the time his best-known early collection, "My Sad Captains", appeared in 1961, Mr. Gunn had settled in America.
His work was honored on both sides of the Atlantic. He won a Guggenheim fellowship in 1971 and was chosen as a MacArthur fellow in 1993. The Man With Night Sweats (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; 1992) was his characteristically unsentimental vision of the AIDS epidemic in San Francisco, and a stark tribute to the friends he lost to it. NYT
Other obituaries and articles: San Francisco Chronicle, The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The Independent, The Guardian.
