Thom Gunn began to love writing from an early age. He grew up in England, where homosexuality was uncommon and being gay made Gunn feel as if he were an outsider. After moving to California, Gunn found a sense of community and happiness, until the AIDS epidemic struck. Thom Gunn’s life consisted of moments of liberation mixed with moments of sadness. His experiences are reflected through his poems. Thom Gunn, a notable San Francisco resident who enjoyed drugs, cooking, gardening, and cats, did not hesitate to write down what he was thinking in his poems. His works are notorious for their homosexual theme. Gunn was an advocate of freedom and equality, which later lead him to his openly homosexual poetry and the theory of communal love. He describes many situations in his poems as “times of joy.” In these periods, the imagination could range freely, allowing him to express himself.
Born Thomson William Gunn, this Anglo-American poet seemed to have a love of writing from an early point on, using his thoughts on life to give him a common theme of love. On August 29, 1929, Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent, England to father Bert Gunn (Poetry Foundation). He was the older son of two journalists who divorced when the poet was only ten years old. His mother tragically committed suicide during Gunn’s teenage years; however, before her death, his mother had inspired a deep love of reading and writing in young Thom, including the writings of Marlowe, Keats, Milton, and Tennyson, as well as several prose writers (Poets.org). Gunn also began to experience the first signs of his homosexuality during this period, but was confused about whether it was stress from the divorce and loss of a parent, or if it was something else that would later ...
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Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my wonderful English teacher,mmmmmm mmmm, along with our amazing librarian, mmmmm mmmml, for helping me research and edit my paper. Without their help I would not have been able to even start this project, let alone finish it.
Throughout history there have been many poets and some have succeeded while others didn’t have the same luck. But in history e.e. Cummings has stunned people with his creativity and exposure to the real world and not living in the fantasy people imagine they live in. Cummings was a great poet, and was able to make his own way of writing while he was also involved greatly in the modernist movement. But he demonstrates all his uniqueness in all and every poem, delivering people with knowledge and making them see the world with different eyes as in the poem “Since feeling is first”. Biography Born on October 14, 1894, E. E. Cummings an American poet was born at home in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Masson, Davis. Essays Biographical and Critical: Chiefly on English Poets. La Vergne, Tennessee: Lightning Source, Inc., 2007.
Homosexuality remained illegal in most parts of America until the 1960s, but Ginsberg refused to equate his Gay identity with criminality. He wrote about his homosexuality in almost every poem that he wrote, most specifically in ‘Many Loves’ (1956) and ‘Please Master’ (1968), his paeans to his errant lover Neal Cassady. Ginsberg’s poems are full of explicit sexual detail and scatological humour, but the inclusion of such details should not be interpreted as a childish attempt to incense the prudish and the square.
Mark Doty is an American poet who uses his platform and his poetry to speak out about society’s castigation of homosexuality. A plethora of Doty’s poems share a theme: a community impacts one’s individuality from a young age.
Thom Jones writes of war, boxing, sickness and sorrow with a blunt air of familiarity and a cyclone of words. His characters -- much like the author himself, who suffers from epilepsy and diabetes -- have been pummeled by the world, but they refuse to be knocked out. His three short story collection -- The Pugilist at Rest, a National Book Awards finalist; Cold Snap and now SONNY LISTON WAS A FRIEND OF MINE (Little, Brown, $23) -- showcases a supreme writer in the throes of a thinking man's agony.
Holbrook, David. Llareggub Revisted: Dylan Thomas and the State of Modern Poetry. Cambridge: Bowes and Bowes, 1965. 100-101.
Rich, Adrienne. “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence.” Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985.” New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1986.
“I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide or press an ear against its hive…” (3); so begins a poem titled “Introduction To Poetry” by Billy Collins. “Introduction To Poetry” is, in fact, the introduction to a collection of poetry called Poetry 180, a program started by Collins during his time as poet laureate for the United States. The aim of this program is to get people, especially teenagers, interested in or reconnected with poetry. Collins selected an assortment of poems that are just fun to read and not meant to be discussed; he says in the forward to the collection, “High school is the focus of my program because all too often it is the place where poetry goes to die” (xvii). Collins was honored with the title of poet laureate in 2001 because of his own outstanding poetry. Billy Collins is considered by some to be the greatest American poet since Robert Frost because he connects with his readers, he makes the mysterious ordinary, and he portrays the ordinary as mysterious.
John Keats’s illness caused him to write about his unfulfillment as a writer. In an analysis of Keats’s works, Cody Brotter states that Keats’s poems are “conscious of itself as the poem[s] of a poet.” The poems are written in the context of Keats tragically short and painful life. In his ...
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First and foremost I would like to express my deepest appreciation to my parents, for their constant support and always enabling me to stay out late due to working on this paper. My brother, and sister, whom at times interfered while writing this paper, but have given me their full support and help at all times.
Denise Levertov chose to write about things that were not readily seen by others. She wrote her poems in free verse and she paced her writing to lead to a climax that contrasted the intensity of her poems. Her artistic voice can be examined in her poem The Ache of Marriage.