Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, on the southern bank of the Thames estuary, in 1929. His childhood was spent mostly in that county, Kent, and in the affluent suburb of Hampstead in northwest London. A relatively happy boyhood was overshadowed first by his parents’ divorce when he was ten and then by his mother’s suicide when he was fifteen. In 1950, after two years’ national service in the army, he went up to Trinity College, Cambridge, to study English. This was during the heyday of F. R. Leavis, whose lectures had a profound effect on Gunn’s early poetry.