On the Move

A number of photographs of the young Thom Gunn can be found on the internet, in which he wears a leather jacket and jeans and looks at the camera with a stern expression, almost as if he had just stepped out of “On the Move” or The Wild One. If Ysenda Maxtone Graham is to be believed, in her 2021 review of The Letters of Thom Gunn for Britain’s Daily Mail, Gunn could often be seen in the 1960s and 70s “cruising round San Francisco on his Harley-Davidson in tight Levi’s and a leather biking jacket.” Obviously, Gunn enjoyed the motorcycle culture, and “On the Move” went a long way in making his reputation and tagging him as a young poet in touch with the new anti-authority, motorcycle, and rock ’n roll culture of the 1950s.

Initially, Gunn was pleased with “On the Move.” He wrote in the Times Educational Supplement in 1956 that “it is the only time I have written adequately on one of the really important subjects: the poem is about movement as an experiment, and about ‘the search for value’ as a value in itself” (Quoted in New Selected Poems: Thom Gunn, edited by Clive Wilmer, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2018, p.