The prose is admirably direct and limpid; the essays do not theorise but lead the reader through the process of reading poems. The main publications are selections of Fulke Greville, Ben Jonson and Ezra Pound and two impressive volumes of essays and reviews, The Occasions of Poetry (1982) and Shelf Life (1993).For those like myself who wrote in his shadow, it is hard to imagine a world without Thom Gunn. From the late 1960s onward he owned one of the famous “Victorian” houses in the Haight-Ashbury district, then at the height of its fame. As such a poem as “Taxi Driver” suggests, with its litany of local names, he was in some ways a regional poet, though conscious that the region had been adopted.He earned his main income from teaching at the University of California at Berkeley, mostly on a part-time basis. Gunn had never been a political poet, yet it must be admitted that these poems had a political effect, helping to educate perceptions of gay life. Moreover, the book regained for Gunn something of the reputation he had had around 1960 when he shared a Selected Poems with Ted Hughes, a book that has kept both writers in the sights of, for instance, A-level students.The Man with Night Sweats was followed by a Collected Poems (1993) and what will now be his last book, Boss Cupid (2000). The golden world of modern California has, too, an Arcadian dimension that reminds one again of the Elizabethans.The next book, Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), presents the darker side of that world, dominated as it is by images of dismemberment, confinement and the “hippy” murderer Charles Manson.

It is also notable as the first book in which Gunn frankly acknowledges his homosexuality, which, though present throughout his work, was masked in the era of prohibition. The latter shows his power to excite and alarm undiminished, notably in “Troubadour”, his largely sympathetic account of a serial killer.Gunn lived nearly all his adult life in the city of San Francisco, which he loved deeply. His model is Ben Jonson, stoical, reticent, restrained and all the more moving as a result. This is the sequence of elegies for friends that dominates The Man with Night Sweats (1992) In these poems Gunn again returns to an Elizabethan manner. Sexual frankness now becomes a major element in his writing, most obviously in The Passages of Joy (1982), though that is also very much concerned with friendship, a substantial theme of Gunn’s.The themes of gay love and ordinary male friendship combine again in tragic circumstances for Gunn’s magisterial response to the Aids epidemic of the late 1980s. As that last phrase suggests, it is the most Poundian of Gunn’s books – Pound’s goal was “To write Paradise” – though, in contrast to Pound, it represents a return to traditional form, as if to say that the indeterminacy of the experiences evoked requires the ordering that rhyme and metre allow. Winding over the line-endings, the syntax mimes the process of falling asleep in his lover’s arms.

They prepare the way for Gunn’s finest single book, Moly (1971), his response to the drug LSD and the psychedelic culture of 1960s California.It is possible to read Moly as a single work on the theme of metamorphosis, of evolving identity and the physical world as paradise. The speaker yields to the fact of the physical world, sinking into “a place” which is at once the warm part of the bed, the realities of love and of common humanity, the unconscious world of sleep, even perhaps the fact of death as the logical extension of our life: the place is not found but seeps from our touch in continuous creation, dark enclosing cocoon round ourselves alone, dark wide realm where we walk with everyone.”Touch” and “Misanthropos” are great poems in a somewhat uncertain collection. Touch also includes Gunn’s first serious attempts at free verse, including the triumphant title poem.The hesitantly delicate movement of this beautiful work leads the reader through a process of thought and discovery, in which the cold and insulated body of the solitary speaker discovers the warmth of love through mere physical contact. The journey from the lonely, self-defended existentialist to the deliberately vulnerable and humane observer is allegorised in what is perhaps Gunn’s most ambitious work, the long sequence “Misanthropos”, which dominates his next book, Touch (1967). “On the Move” celebrates that hero of modern American culture, the biker, but does so in the manner of John Donne.

There is a famous poem on Elvis Presley, a celebration of the American city and explorations of sexual irregularity – rent-boys, fetishists and voyeurism. The post-war Army provided him with a complex persona, the unremarkable soldier who, in imagination as in body, is trained for conflict.Cambridge English in the era of F.R. Leavis, whom he greatly admired, provided him with the intellectual equivalent of this, a toughness of the mind. It was reinforced by friendship with a fellow undergraduate, Tony White, who acted impressively in student plays and died sadly young.