Gunn, Thom

Gunn, Thom(son William)

(born Aug. 29, 1929, Gravesend, Kent, Eng.—died April 25, 2004, San Francisco, Calif., U.S.) British-U.S. poet. Educated at Cambridge and Stanford universities, he lived in San Francisco from the 1950s and taught for many years at the University of California, Berkeley. His early verse appeared in Fighting Terms (1954) and The Sense of Movement (1957); in the late 1950s his poems became more experimental. My Sad Captains (1961), Moly (1971), Jack Straw's Castle (1976), and The Passages of Joy (1982) discuss his homosexuality; The Man with Night Sweats (1992) has AIDS as a subject. Other collections include Collected Poems (1993) and Boss Cupid (2000).