The British poet Thom Gunn (1929-2004) spent most of his adult life in California, where be moved in 1954 to be close to his partner Mike Kitay. It is this more adventurous environment in which he produced his work after his first book of poetry came out in 1953. However, he was born, and spent part of his childhood, in Gravesend and the area around it. His birthplace, at 78 Old Road East, is a detached house that still stands in the south east of the town. In `The Occasions of Poetry: Essays in Criticism and Autobiography’, a collection issued in 1980, in `My Life Up to Now’ he refers directly to his earliest years. His parents had been journalists, his father working for the Daily Express. `My father’, Gunn writes:
`was the son of a merchant seaman whose family had emigrated from north-east Scotland to Kent some time in the nineteenth century…. He was a man full of charm who made friends easily; I remember in my childhood how exciting the house was on his days off, crowded with colleagues and their wives – every weekend seemed like a party. But he and my mother were divorced when I was eight or nine, and I never found myself close to him. Neither of is ever invited each other into any intimacy; from my mid-teens onwards we were jealous and suspicious of each other, content to do our duty and no more.’ (`Occasions of Poetry’, ed Clive Wilmer, North Point Press, San Francisco, 1985, 179).
His mother’s ancestors had also originated from Scotland, but one of the sons settled in Kent at the end of the nineteenth century, working as a bailiff on a farm. They were nonconformists, who, the year of Gunn’s mother’s birth (1903) lived in Snodland and Halling. His mother worked for the Kent Messenger, based nearby. Moving around the country due to his father’s work, they ended up settled in Hampstead, London. It was here that his mother tragically committed suicide when he was fifteen. `After my mother’s death.. I lived with family friends in Hampstead during the weekdays of the term and with two of my aunts in Snodland during weekends and vacations’ (Ibid, 182). While living in the village he helped out on a milk round they ran.
Gunn’s subsequent life was to grow increasingly distant from where he had been born. After two years of national service, and a brief stay in Paris, he went to Cambridge and fell under the initial influence of F R Leavis, then in his pomp there. But on his removal to the West Coast of the US, he absorbed the influence of figures like Yvor Winters, and his poetry became increasingly experimental, but also more and more open about his sexuality, and drugs.
Gunn counselled against reading too much into a poet’s work from their life story. `The danger of biography, and equally of autobiography, is that it can muddy poetry by confusing it with its sources,’ he stated (ibid 197). In `The Nature of an Action’, a poem from the 1957 collection `The Sense of Movement’, he talked of `the great obstruction of myself,’ capturing this sense of the necessity and yet the limitations of subjectivity and the self well. In another, addressed to Yvor Winters, he writes of how:
`All is relative
For mind as for the sense, we have to live
In a half-world, not ours or history’s,
And learn the false from half-true premises.’
Gunn’s place of birth in Gravesend is unmarked.