PositiveThe Threepenny ReviewThe letters don’t home in on a contested field of poetics, like Duncan’s and Denise Levertov’s exchanges about political writing during the Vietnam War; nor do they offer the titillation of a personal breakdown, like many correspondences of Gunn’s contemporaries; nor do they form an imaginative continuity with his poems, like the letters of Keats or Hart Crane. There’s also the fact that letter writing, as a cultural practice, was nearing extinction by the end of Gunn’s life. Doorstop volumes such as this one and James Merrill’s letters, which came out in 2021, feel like an endangered species. What Gunn’s letters do offer are fascinating glimpses into the way a first-rate poet managed to keep a precarious gift at the center of his life, while also fully living that life ... Of course Gunn saved his best stuff for the poems. He had been practicing how to do so, how to manage a life inside an art, for half a century. What the letters argue for, in the end, is the worthiness of such a pursuit, the returns of such complicated decision-making.
