The American Poetry of Thom Gunn and Geoffrey Hill

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of twentieth-century American poetry those uses imply. Gunn and Hill inherit modern American poetry differently (to an extent, they inherit a different American poetry) from most American poets of their era. As a result, one chapter in postmodern American poetry, one elaboration of what is possible after and in response to modern American poetry, is being written by Englishmen. Winters and Tate are conspicuous influences on Gunn and Hill.1 To investigate Gunn's or Hill's debts to the Americans, therefore, is not to discover buried sources, in the manner of Harold Bloom's