Douglas Dunn, who has died aged 83, was overjoyed to find himself among the poetic aristocracy at Faber and Faber in 1969. His first book, Terry Street, had been accepted “by the publisher which issued Eliot, Pound, Auden, Larkin, Ted Hughes, Thom Gunn, and Seamus Heaney. When my copies arrived, I kissed them.”
Dunn stuck with Faber throughout his writing life, and they with him. The successful quartet of Heaney, Hughes, Larkin and Gunn – following on from the Eliot-led ensemble of the 1920s and 30s – might have become a quintet, but Dunn’s leftwing commitment and his adherence to rigorous prosody set him apart from the hedonism of Gunn, on the one hand, and the likable populism of Heaney, on the other.
