Gunn, Thom(son) William (1929–2004)

English poet. One of his finest works is ‘Misanthropos’, in the collectionsTouch (1967), which explores the tough humanism of the last man alive after an atomic catastrophe. His other volumes of poetry include Poems 1950–66, A Selection (1969), and Jack Straw's Castle and other Poems (1976).

He was born in Gravesend and educated at Trinity College, Cambridge, and Stanford University, Palo Alto, California. He taught at the University of California, Berkeley, 1958–66. Gunn came to prominence with the Cambridge ‘Movement’ poets of the early 1950s, among them Kingsley Amis, Philip Larkin, and John Wain, but in contrast to their restrained tone and cultivated neutrality, he sought a rigid rhetoric and explored the power of will in his poetry.