Thom Gunn's collection The Man with Night Sweats (1992) memorialised friends lost to AIDS in verse of extraordinary formal control and emotional depth. Gunn, a British-born poet who had lived in San Francisco since the 1950s, watched the epidemic devastate his community and wrote poems that combined the classical traditions of English verse — sonnets, syllabics, heroic couplets — with the most intimate and bodily modern experience. The collection is widely regarded as the finest poetic response to the AIDS epidemic in English.

Gunn's AIDS poems placed themselves in the long tradition of plague and epidemic literature, invoking Donne and the metaphysical poets while engaging with a specifically late twentieth-century experience of viral and parasitic disease. His formal mastery gave a classical dignity to the experiences of bodily degradation and death from opportunistic infection that the poems described, demonstrating once again that the literary tradition of writing about parasites and disease could accommodate the highest formal ambitions. The Man with Night Sweats is the twentieth century's outstanding contribution to the tradition of epidemic poetry in English.