604
PARTISAN REVIEW
Thorn Gunn's
Fighting Terms
was first published in England
in
1954, when the author was about 24. It is, for my money, the most
impressive first book of poems since Robert Lowell's. Though
1954
was before the craze began, Mr. Gunn is in a sense an "angry" poet.
His
anger, however, has nothing to do with the social snobberies that plague
John Osborne's heroes.
It
is more a matter of smelling out and analyzing
that sense of violence which underlies the inertia of contemporary Eng–
land. Occasionally the violence gets the better of him; Mr. Gunn's
verse can be crude at times, too aggressive, too heroic. But that,
in
a way, adds to the power: he is a poet who is at least willing to lay
himself open and risk his poise in order to say his say. There is,
in
fact, a great vitality in his poems that makes Mr. Gunn sound,
in
a
wholly contemporary way, rather like Donne. Not the orthodox Donne,
as created by Cleanth Brooks, all dandified logic, contrived conceits and
an irony so refined as to be humorless ; but the Donne who, out of
im–
patience with the pieties of Elizabethan verse, changed the language of
poetry to suit his own colloquial intelligence. Mr. Gunn, at his best,
has the same tough and peculiarly open liveliness of mind; he has
the
same rhythmical arrogance:
...
came to her in different shape
Than to Europa, Danae, Leda.
Paris. He was a man. And yet .
..
Above all, he has the same ability to present the shock of experience
m an image which w;rks as a kind of complex dramatic situation:
The huge wound in my head began to heal
About the beginning of the seventh week.
Its valleys darkened, its villages became still:
For
joy
I did not move and dared not speak.
His business is then, like Donne's, to use his full, quizzical poetic intelli–
gence in order that the complexities may play themselves out in
their
own terms. But there is no point in quoting at length.
Fighting Terms
is available for 75 cents. Anyone who doesn't buy it is simply not inter–
ested in the best poetry of the 'fifties.
In comparison, Philip Larkin's
The Less Deceived
does not have
that sense of potentiality. Mr. Larkin is older than Mr. Gunn and
his
style has already crystallized out. This is, in short, as little the conven–
tional first volume of poems as
Harmonium.
It has a finish and a
per–
fection in its own terms, like that of Graves or Frost, which comes
partly from the high level of technical accomplishment and partly from
t
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