The subtitle of this biography alludes to a line from Hardy that Thom Gunn used as the epigraph for his last collection, Boss Cupid: “Well, it’s a cool queer tale.” Gunn’s life was cool and queer in the way that we use those epithets now; his poetry was cool and queer in the way that Hardy used them.
His breakthrough poems in the 1950s were all Elvis, Brando and biker gangs in content; but existentialist in preoccupation and rigorously Elizabethan in form. He was a very old‑fashioned modern. After FR Leavis, his great critical father figure was the austerely tweedy Yvor Winters. His lodestars were Ezra Pound, John Donne, Thomas Wyatt and Stendhal. In his life and in his work he sought control, panache, a willed stance to meet the world.
