Revolting into Style

To write a poem about Elvis Presley in 1956 – even a serious one – was quite extraordinary, especially if you were a twenty-seven-year-old Cambridge graduate on the road to becoming an English professor. Perhaps not so surprising if you were living in the United States and attracted to handsome young men in leather. But, at that time, same sex attraction was a taboo subject, same sexual relations between men were illegal, and among poetry circles the subject matter of the new rock-and-roll music would have been deemed frivolous, if considered at all. But this was Thom Gunn. One only had to look at the way he spelled his name, changed legally from Thomas to Thomson to honour his mother, Charlotte Thomson, who took her own life when Gunn was fifteen. Tragically for her two sons, Thom and Ander (Alexander), they were the ones to discover her body lying on the sitting room floor in her dressing gown, a gas poker stuck into her mouth.

Although devastated, Gunn remained outwardly cool. He reserved hatred for his father, a successful newspaper editor, who had been divorced from his mother five years before. After her death, Gunn was able to continue his education courtesy of family friends in Hampstead, spending vacations with his mother’s many sisters in rural Kent. Being an able scholar at private school, if not particularly good at Latin, he was accepted to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge, in October 1950, after serving his two years obligatory National Service in the army as ...