A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "Considering the Snail"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Thom Gunn's "Considering the Snail", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Studentsfor all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jan 18, 2018
• ISBN: 9781535846059

Book preview

Considering the Snail

Thom Gunn

1961

Introduction

"Considering the Snail,’ by Thom Gunn, was originally published in 1961 in his third collection, My Sad Captains and Other Poems. Gunn, who rocketed to fame in his native England with his first two books, Fighting Terms (1954) and The Sense of Movement (1957), was known for writing a muscular poetry, in traditional English verse forms, about heroic and/or masculine subjects like soldiers and motorcycle gangs. He was linked to the so-called Movement poets. However, he was characteristically modest about his early fame, noting in an autobiographical essay called Cambridge in the Fifties’: ‘My first books were reviewed more kindly than they deserved largely, I think, because London expected good poets to emerge from Oxford and Cambridge and here I was.

By the time My Sad Captains was published, Gunn was living in the United States. While at Cambridge he fell in love with an American, Mike Kitay, with whom he would live in San Francisco for life. While the late 1950s and early 1960s were the heyday of the Beat poetry movement in San Francisco, Gunn was not among them. A sense of outraged decorum prevented him from participating in that movement as it was happening, but the 1960s saw his first forays out of traditional English iambic pentameter and into syllabic and free-verse forms.

My Sad Captains is a book divided in two. The first half's poems feature the traditional forms and subjects with which Gunn had been working at Cambridge. The second half's poems are written in syllabics, a verse form he used to teach himself how to write free verse. Considering the Snail is one of these poems, and while it remains a very fine poem on its own merits, it is important to Gunn's oeuvre because it represents this important turning point in his development as a poet. The poem appears in his Selected Poems (2009).

Author Biography

Thomson William Gunn was born on August 29, 1929, in Gravesend, Kent, England. Gunn's father, Herbert, was a newspaper editor, and his mother, Charlotte, was a former journalist and leftist. Gunn was very close to his mother, who committed suicide when he was fifteen. Gunn and his brother discovered her body, which was a deeply traumatic event. In an interview with the Paris Review, Gunn said: I was devastated for about four years. I very much retired into myself…. Maybe originally I wrote as a way of getting out of that.

Gunn attended Trinity College, of the University