Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master

by D.A. Powell (Editor), Kevin Prufer (Editor)

Nonfiction. Poetry. LGBT Studies. Literary Criticism.

In the 1940s, Dunstan Thompson, a gay WWII veteran, was a darling of the Modernist poetry communities in New York and London and widely considered one of the most talented poets of his generation. In 1950, he all but disappeared. This book (which includes his poems and essays by various critics—among them Katie Ford, Dana Gioia, Edward Field, Jerry Harp, Jim Elledge, and Heather Treseler) examines his legacy, his poetry, and his eventual abandonment of his earlier gay identity in favor of a reinvigorated Catholicism. It's the first volume in Pleiades Press's "Unsung Masters Series."

Genres: Poetry

190 pages, Paperback

First published June 15, 2010

About the author

D. A. Powell is the author of Tea, Lunch, Cocktails, Chronic and Useless Landscape, or A Guide for Boys, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry in 2013.

Repast, Powell's latest, collects his three early books in a handsome volume introduced by novelist David Leavitt.

A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, Powell lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Follow D. A. Powell on Twitter: Powell_DA

Reviews

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetry itself deserves more than five stars. "Lost American Master" might ring of marketing hyperbole, but this is a case where it's more than deserved. And the reasons why this is a folio of selections from his already-limited body of work plus critical essays and not full reissues of his poetry collections is such a fascinating story in and of itself.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll go ahead and say this: It's a shame Thompson became devout in the latter part of his life. His Catholic faith so consumed him that he all but forswore the conflicted, passionate, immensely complex and rich poetry of his first two books, Poems and Lament for the Sleepwalker. Many of the best poems from those are included in this collection, but the books cannot be reprinted in their entirety, per Thompson's will.

Instead, Thompson wants to be remembered by the poems he wrote from 1950 to 1974, most of which were unpublished and, as at least one of the critical essays in the book agrees, not as good as the poems he wrote in the '40s. Philip Trower, Thompson's partner and executer, stands by this decision, claiming that the later poems are "greatly superior" to the early books. But it seems he believes this because they reflect the peace of mind Thompson found through his religious rebirth, not because they are truly more accomplished.

Anyway, what this book shows is that Thompson, despite his somewhat self-imposed disappearance, deserves the recognition he earned at the height of his career -- because really, those poems are unforgettable. "This Loneliness for You Is Like the Wound" ought to be as well-known as Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" or Rimbaud's "Dormeur du Val" in the canon of war poems. Even the unpublished poems from the latter half of his life have some real knockout moments.

And besides proving its point, the book is engaging -- investigative but not too academic. My one gripe is that Heather Treseler's essay, probably the driest individual piece of the book, is also the longest. But the other essays, especially Katie Ford's, are very well written and recommend the poetry nicely. Ultimately the book gives you a very whole picture of Thompson. It acts as a tribute and is still basically impartial.

[Christopher]

I am currently reading Dunstan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master. This is a richly constructed tribute (and something more complex than that at the same time) to Thompson, who was gay (though that too, it becomes clear, is more complex). The book contains beautiful photographs of the strangely handsome Thompson, actual clippings from Thompson's short-lived lit man Vice Versa, varied essays from scholars who have thought deeply on his work, and most importantly a folio of his work (his early book are said to be hard to get a hold of and are out of print). Thompson's WWII era poetry is something to experience! The editors are D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer, so even if all of that doesn't make you want to check this book out, that should. Here's the basics:

"In the 1940s, Dunstan Thompson, a gay WWII veteran, was a darling of the Modernist poetry communities in New York and London and widely considered one of the most talented poets of his generation. In 1950, he all but disappeared. This book (which includes his poems and essays by various critics--among them Katie Ford, Dana Gioia, Edward Field, Jerry Harp, Jim Elledge, and Heather Treseler) examines his legacy, his poetry, and his eventual abandonment of his earlier gay identity in favor of a reinvigorated Catholicism. It's the first volume in Pleiades Press's "Unsung Masters Series" (Amazon)

Jim Elledge's the essay, I have to admit, was the piece I most interested in reading, especially seeing that he edited this book (which I want!!). His essay, "Dunstan Thompson's Beautiful and Butcher Beast, Unleashed and on the Prowl," theorizes that Thompson was trying to connect with both gay and non-gay readerships. Elledge writes, "Thompson is far more open in his view of the beloved than the times typically allowed, all too aware of the pros and cons of surrendering himself to another especially during times of way, all too aware of how any relationship with another soldier would, by necessity, be temporary. After all, the lover and his beloved are warriors whose very lives depended on their being focused on surviving battles and on killing others. Survival,that lovely euphemism for putting oneself first and others later, allows for carefree couplings---tricks, one-night stands---and for disregarding a sex-mate's feelings after orgasm." (Interesting to think about Thompson's work in light of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy!) It's Thompson's way of picturing the lover in "contradictory and in decidedly unsympathetic" as well as "his willingness" to portray the lover in "realistic terms" that Elledge says "hooked" him.

Also check out Clive James' "The Necessary Minimum: Dunstan Thompson slides out of the shadows," which contains this moment:

"From what thin biographical evidence exists, it is possible to conclude that Thompson was one of those gay male poets trapped between the urge to speak and the love that dare not speak its name. Auden escaped the trap by scarcely dropping a hint until the safety whistle blew decades later. But Thompson wanted to spill the beans, not just about Damon and Pythias and Richard II and A.E. Housman—whether named or merely alluded to, they all crop up during the poem—but about himself and his lover, evidently a fellow serviceman. Unfortunately he could spill only a few beans at once. There were limits to what he could say, and the result is a flurry of tangential suggestions, a cloud of innuendo."

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gay scholar and poet David Bergman called him the gayest poet of World War II, and National Endowment for the Arts chief Dana Gioia called him the best Catholic poet of the latter half of the 20th Century. This is Dunstan Thompson...

-What Became of Dunstan Thompson?, Edward Field.

I'll be honest - I had never heard of Dunstan Thompson, which is surprising because I've read and enjoyed a good chunk of the Modernist poets, and through them discovered my beloved Hilda Doolittle. But none of them told me about Dunstan Thompson, or if they did I wasn't ready to listen. When I read that above passage in this book I wondered how it was I hadn't heard about him (Gay? Catholic? Suh-weet!), but the point of this book was that Thompson is relatively obscure today. The subtitle after all is "On the Life & Work of a Lost American Master".

Winning this through the Goodreads First-Reads Giveaway Thingy I wasn't sure if I would get around to reading it or not. Once I sat down with it this weekend though I was so glad I hadn't ignored it. It starts with a decent introduction by Kevin Prufer, poet and editor/director of Pleiades and co-editor of this book. From there it goes directly into the Folio in which the reader gets the first taste of Thompson's writing. This is the sad part for me because I don't understand how his poetry isn't more available. Why isn't he being taught in school?

After an all too brief experience with Thompson's poetry the rest of the book is mainly critical essays which only made me more angry and fist-shaky at the literary world for conspiring to hide him from me.

Powell and Prufer did exactly what they set out to do - they brought back to life a poet who left the literary scene entirely too soon. With any luck this particular book will reach more people so they can also see what they've been missing all this time. And I will punch anyone in the face who tells me they've already read Thompson. Or anyone who owns a copy of Lament for the Sleepwalker and never told me.

[Brent Calderwood · Rating 4 out of 5]

We’re told not to judge a book by its cover, but just look at the pillow-lipped, sleepy-eyed poet gazing out from a soft-focus 1940s sepiatone on Dustan Thompson: On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master and your hunch is bound to be right. What’s inside is just as out of the ordinary as it looks: quirky, rarefied, romantic, and unabashedly epicene.


For this first offering in Pleiades Press’s Unsung Masters Series, esteemed poet-editors D.A. Powell and Kevin Prufer have unearthed a rare gem, and in the process rescued Thompson from becoming a literary footnote. As they explain in their introduction—which gamely balances academic rigor with engaging narrative—information about Thompson was hard to come by. He had virtually dropped off the literary map by the 1950s, even though his World War II-era work was well-published alongside that of Ezra Pound, W.H. Auden and others.

Powell and Prufer offer valuable insights into why Thompson remains elusive: the burning of literary bridges, a midlife conversion to Catholicism, and his own stipulation against posthumous republication of his first two collections of poetry—the poetry that was best-received and also most homoerotic.

Thankfully, the editors, by means of scholarly detective work and presumably a healthy dose of charm, have gained permission to publish a modest selection from those two volumes, as well as from his later narrative and poetic work. Their assiduous selections make a persuasive case for the inclusion of Thompson’s work among the best in mid-century gay poetry, as well as among the best of WWII-genre poetry (Thompson, in spite of his trust fund and apparent fragility, fought with the U.S. Army).
Rupert Brooke, who drove Cambridge boys, and modern reviewers, wild

Thompson’s work compares well with contemporaries like Rupert Brooke and Stephen Spender; and for a niche modern readership, which includes this reviewer, those comparisons alone make this book worth a look. For many others, though, Thompson’s adherence to form and meter and his frequent Classical allusions may at first glance seem old-fashioned or twee. However, his consistent musicality, his clever use of internal rhyme, slant rhyme, enjambment and campy, odd imagery transcend era and convention, making Emily Dickinson an even more apt comparison.

In “This Loneliness for You Is Like the Wound,” Thompson uses eyewitness war imagery to address his lover—ostensibly the girl at home, but more likely the boy on the next cot:

This loneliness for you is like the wound
That keeps the soldier patient in his bed,
Smiling to soothe the general on his round
Of visits to the somehow not yet dead …

The sonnet teems with clever loaded images like “bullet-bearing heart” and “fever chart,” concluding with the heroic couplet “Yet now, when death is not a metaphor, / Who dares to say that love is like the war?” In building a love sonnet around homosocial and homoerotic imagery and ending with an almost postmodern consideration of use of metaphor within the poem itself, Thompson blazed the trail for later New Formalists like Thom Gunn and Randall Mann, whose work is anything but twee.

Like many writers before him and since, Thompson frequently locates his poems in Classical or military settings to allow for an otherwise unconventional emphasis on masculine sexuality. “Tarquin,” for instance, is a vague-ish Roman title, but the poem reads as an au courant lament for a lost trick, or else as an ode to a newfound bad-boy: “The red-haired robber in the ravished bed,” “the sinner who is saint instead,” “bellboy beauty, this flamingo groom.”

Thompson’s work, overflowing with double entendres and winking metaphors, will no doubt provide poetry lovers with the same giddy, titillating awe that film buffs get from watching classic Film Noir (which similarly gained traction during the war years). It’s an awe that comes from seeing artistic work whose innovation, naughtiness, and depth not only survived, but were born of, the conventions and limitations that threatened to censor them.

Powell and Prufer capstone these tantalizing glimpses of Thompson’s oeuvre with wonderful essays by other poets and critics, including Edward Field—himself an early acquaintance of Thompson’s—and Dana Gioia. There is also a middle-of-the-book folio of images—a privilege most often reserved for Hollywood sirens and literary giants.
Edward Field in U.S. Army, where he met Thompson
The schoolboy and soldier snapshots are a delight for the reader who’s already gotten a taste of Thompson’s elegant, ribald sensibility; the photo reproductions of pages from Thompson’s short-lived lit journal Vise Versa will give the reader a further taste of the kind of campy, envelope-pushing poems and reviews Thompson wrote—work that we hope will one day be republished in full, but, were it not for this new and valuable volume, might never have been known about at all.

On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master
Dunstan Thompson
On the Life and Work of a Lost American Master
Edited by D. A. Powell and Kevin Prufer
Pleiades Press
9780964145412, Paperback, 190 pp

[Latayne · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite poet. I still don't understand why they didn't include his sonnets to his father, though. Those are his best poems and they were barely mentioned.

[Woody · Rating 5 out of 5]

After reading this one, I want to read all of the books in the Unsung Masters Series. This one includes a sampling of poems, essays, and photos of Dunstan Thompson. As you move through the various types of material, a portrait of the poet's slowly becomes more and more vivid. Surprisingly exciting and emotionally resonant.

[Fred · Rating 3 out of 5]

Greg Wolfe recommended this book, so I ordered it. Wolfe recently announced that he is "currently editing a Selected Poems of Dunstan Thompson, which will contain work from the entire range of his life. Likely publication date: 2012."

[Gina]

Lucky to have won on First Reads!!

[Caleb Tankersley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Check out my review of this book on newpages.com:

http://www.newpages.com/bookreviews/2...