“”My childhood – which I spent largely in London except during the Blitz – was full of soldiers, American, English, every other nationality. With National Service, we were all non-soldiers, we were just in for a couple of years. We weren’t going to kill people – we would have been terrified of killing people! – and the people in the regular army, our sergeants, did tend to despise us, and you could see why. So, yes, isn’t it interesting how many soldiers there are in my early poetry and how often I am the soldier and I’m not really sure what I’m doing? Not especially romanticised except when I think of Achilles or somebody. So it was a very ambiguous role, but it was a role that apparently I tended to see myself in, especially in that first book. And I don’t think it was that conscious or deliberate. I had to think about it afterwards to find out what could have been in my mind.”
He then spent six months in Paris, on a low-paying sinecure arranged by his father, before going up to Cambridge at 21. One of his friends there was Karl Miller. “Karl was my best friend for a while; I knew him very well: we were both rather difficult people, but he was very kind to me and he always had a very good mind. I’d show him my poems when I wrote them and he’d tack them up over his desk, which was very flattering.”
Miller recalls that Gunn “was a good student and critic, who enjoyed the degree. Leavis was sovereign at the time. Gunn was sympathetic to Leavis but not a Leavisite. We were both involved in the same discussions and clubs and so on. I wrote a lengthy profile of him for the student newspaper Varsity.” He adds, “He knew how to keep the ball in the air in terms of literary attention.”
At Cambridge, Gunn had begun publishing his poems, and wrote the bulk of his first collection, Fighting Terms (1954) in his last two years there. They are startlingly assured pieces, formally controlled, metaphysical, with a subtext that only seems obviously homoerotic in retrospect.”
How my heart sings 