Thom Gunn was one of the most charismatic poetic talents of the past half century and one of its shrewdest moralists. He made a strong critical impact with his first collection Fighting Terms (1954), written while an undergraduate at Cambridge. His reputation wavered after his move to the United States, but he continued to develop as a poet, drawing on Modernist and traditional techniques, applying the disciplines of art to a life lived experimentally. From the 1970s on, his poetry dealt frankly with homosexual experience and his 1992 volume The Man With Night Sweats, which registered the effects of the Aids crisis, won the first Forward Prize for poetry in Britain and the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize in the United States.

Thomson William Gunn was born in Gravesend, the elder son of Herbert and Ann Gunn. His parents were both journalists, his father becoming Editor of the Evening Standard when the family moved to Hampstead in 1937. Gunn’s childhood was marked by his parents’ divorce and his mother’s suicide. Gunn got on badly with his father and opted to live with family friends during his last years at University College School, spending weekends and holidays with his two aunts in Kent.

Some of the loneliness of this period is glanced at in a passage from the sequence Positives (1966), which was written to accompany his brother Ander’s photographs:

In a family there is
a sense of many doing
many things, all different,
absorbed in different rooms.

Despite the fashion for confessional writing in the 1960s and 1970s, Gunn wrote directly about his mother’s death only late in his career, exemplifying the reticence that characterised his work as much as its more notorious surface content about the louche world of bathhouse sex and leather-clad hipsters.

Gunn’s mother inspired his love of reading. As a teenager he immersed himself in Keats, Tennyson, Lamartine and, significantly, Marlowe, learning large sections of The Oxford Book of English Verse by heart, so that when he began writing, traditional metres were second nature to him. After a stay in Paris and two years’ National Service, he went to Trinity College, Cambridge, where he came under the influence of F. R. Leavis, met his lifetime partner Mike Kitay, and wrote his first collection, which was published in Oxford by the American poet Donald Hall at his Fantasy Press.

Gunn’s work was associated with the Movement poets collected in the anthology New Lines, and was first noticed for its intellectual toughness and scepticism. Carnal Knowledge opens, characteristically: “Even in bed I pose”, and has as its refrain: “You know I know you know I know you know.”

Gunn’s indebtedness to Donne and that modern metaphysical William Empson was matched by an existentialist cool. The experience of America gave him — in the images of a young Elvis Presley who “turns revolt into a style” and of Brandoesque motorcyclists “Born to Lose” — contemporary figures through which to explore the paradoxes of freedom and power. He had gone to America in 1954 to be close to Kitay, who was serving in the Air Force, and to study under Yvor Winters at Stanford.

Winters shared Gunn’s interest in the Elizabethan plain style — Gunn would later edit selections of poems by Ben Jonson and Fulke Greville — but he also pointed Gunn in the direction of Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams, whose poems were not available in England at the time.

Gunn came gradually to experiment with free verse, moving through Marianne Moore-like syllabics in Considering the Snail from My Sad Captains (1961), to the improvised structure of Touch (1967):

Meanwhile and slowly
I feel a is it
my own warmth surfacing or
the ferment of your whole
body that in darkness beneath
the cover is stealing
bit by bit to break
down that chill.

For Gunn, open forms offered the opportunity to deal with present experience more immediately and sensuously than before. Some of his British readers saw the new development as a softening of focus and were not encouraged by Gunn’s listing of “cheap thrills” as his pastime in Who’s Who? or by his footnoting of the poems in Moly (1971) with details of the drugs taken before their composition. He had been introduced to mescalin by Paul Bowles in 1959 and remained an unembarrassed apologist for psychotropic drugs and for casual sex.

Gunn had settled in San Francisco and taught at the University of California, Berkeley, latterly for only part of the year. He shared a flat in the Haight Ashbury district with Kitay, two other men and some cats — its front room decorated with 1950s soft drink posters and a working Wurlitzer juke box. His sexuality (and Kitay’s) had been the subject of legal inquiries early in Gunn’s time in America, and perhaps for that reason he waited until the mid-1970s, “until it was completely safe”, to come out as a homosexual. His regard for fellow San Franciscan poet Robert Duncan included an admiration for the way he had dealt openly with his sexuality since the 1940s.

Two collections of tough-minded essays The Occasions of Poetry (1982) and Shelf Life (1993) allowed Gunn to bring together his varied literary enthusiasms and to argue for a poetry in which discourse and argument are just as important as image and sensuousness. Though he preferred to celebrate, he could be a severe critic of the fashionable middle way, mounting a persuasive attack on Helen Vendler’s Harvard Book of Contemporary Poetry (published in England as The Faber Book of Contemporary American Poetry) for its omission of the polar extremes of open and closed form in the work of Charles Olson and J. V. Cunningham respectively.

Gunn’s later collections, Jack Straw’s Castle (1976), The Passages of Joy (1982), The Man With Night Sweats (1992) and Boss Cupid (2000) were steady and balanced achievements. He moved effortlessly between precisely sculpted free verse and traditional forms, recording the life he saw around him with a unique mixture of tenderness and detachment. The continuing importance of his talent was signalled by major poems such as The Hug , with its praise of the “secure firm dry embrace” of established love, and The Gas-poker, in which he finally confronted the tragedy of his teenage years:

The children went to and fro
On the harsh winter lawn
Repeating their lament,
A burden to each other
In the December dawn,
Elder and younger brother,
Till they knew what it meant.
Knew all there was to know.

The openness and intelligence of Gunn’s mature work as much as his charisma made him an example for younger British poets. His direct influence was seen in the work of the poets Dick Davies and Clive Wilmer, while others saw him as a totemic figure — Alan Jenkins treasuring a battered pair of jeans that Gunn had lent the poet Hugo Williams. Unafraid of the possibility of ridiculousness, he was, in Mark Ford’s words, the “least self-serving” of our poet-critics.

Mike Kitay survives him.

Thom Gunn, poet, was born on August 29, 1929. He died on April 25, 2004, aged 74.