Thom Gunn’s career as an elegist was tied closely to the onset of the Aids epidemic in the 1980s, during which he saw many of his friends die. Despite loosening his early formalism after absorbing the work of the New American Poets, Gunn’s vision of the poet was not as a confessional diarist but rather a careful stylist of well-wrought verse drawing on the traditions of Fulke Greville and Ben Jonson. In this episode, Seamus and Mark look at elegies including ‘Talbot Road’, ‘The Gas-poker’ and others from his celebrated collection The Man with Night Sweats, where Gunn combined this allusive, rhetorical style with a poignant realism to recreate his subjects. They then turn to the more self-reflexive, oblique elegies of Paul Muldoon, who has reinvented the form in richly-patterned, playful poems such as ‘The Soap Pig’ and ‘Incantata’.
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More in the LRB:
Thom Gunn's 'Lament': https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn1
Colm Tóibín on Gunn: https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn2
Michael Nott: Thom Gunn in New York: https://lrb.me/ldep12gunn3
Markl Ford on Muldoon: https://lrb.me/ldep12muldoon1
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