TWO VERSIONS OF ORPHEUS: EDGAR BOWERS AND THOM GUNN

7 1 R T W O V E R S I O N S O F O R P H E U S E D G A R B O W E R S A N D T H O M G U N N T I M O T H Y S T E E L E Thom Gunn once wrote a letter of reference for Edgar Bowers, and he evidently said afterward that the experience made him feel like Philip Sidney recommending Fulke Greville. The story got back to Bowers, who was much amused by it. Those who knew Gunn will recognize the comparison as typical of his charming way of connecting him and his contemporaries with earlier writers or with characters in his favorite novels and plays. In an autobiographical essay from 1979, ‘‘My Life Up to Now,’’ he reports that when his mother was pregnant with him she read all of Edward Gibbon’s History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. ‘‘From her,’’ he says, ‘‘I got the complete implicit idea, from as far back as I can remember, of books as not just a commentary on life but a part of its continuing activity.’’ His earliest published poem, which appeared in a school magazine when he was ten, had as its title and refrain, ‘‘A Thousand Cheers for Authors.’’ (Alexandre Dumas was his favorite at the time: ‘‘he’s the best I know!’’ Gunn says in the poem’s final non-refrain line.) By his mid-teens, he had formed a determination to join the ranks of authors himself, and after realizing this ambition as an adult, he gauged his and his fellow poets’ 7 2 S T E E L E Y development and traits in light of those of the great writers who had preceded them. Readers of Gunn and Bowers will appreciate the aptness of the analogy between them and Sidney and Greville. Like Sidney and Greville, they were poet-friends whose works exhibit a similarly high degree of accomplishment yet appeal to us in di√erent ways. Gunn’s poems engage us immediately, as Sidney’s do, with their colloquial energy and lively accessibility. Like the author of The Arcadia and Astrophel and Stella, Gunn restlessly and entertainingly ranges through a variety of literary forms and tones. At once romantic and realistic, his poems often concern human conduct , especially as it entails our struggle to integrate desire and reason and to reconcile the values of community with those of individual will. Bowers inclines, like Greville, more to metaphysical topics and to philosophical and scientific matters involving being and consciousness. He also resembles Greville in that his poems can be di≈cult. They have impressive weight, feature memorable turns of phrase and thought, and o√er startling flashes of insight into the human condition; but they sometimes present syntactical complexities that require careful parsing and obscurities that only patient rereading or special knowledge can clarify. Gunn’s analogy also reminds us that his poetry is, like Sidney’s, tragic-comic – especially in its sensitivity to the inextricable connections between the corrupting and redemptive elements in our loves and obsessions – whereas Bowers’s work expresses a steady, somber awareness of human tragedy. Paradoxically, Bowers communicates , particularly in his later poems, a more deeply informed hope for our fate than almost any other poet of recent times. But he shares with Greville a Calvinist background and a Calvinist appreciation that human knowledge is limited and that human character is imperfect. In this respect, he resembles the Greville who, in his biography of Sidney, described himself as someone who ‘‘chose not to write to them on whose foot the black ox had not already trod, as the proverb is, but to those only, that are weather-beaten in the sea of this world.’’ The Sidney-Greville analogy points as well to the di√erent arcs of Gunn’s and Bowers’s careers and the di√erent degrees of public success they enjoyed. Just as the young Sidney was the literary star of Queen Elizabeth’s court, so Gunn began publishing poems in T W O V E R S I O...