Thom Gunn Quotes

"There have been two popular subjects for poetry in the last few decades: the Vietnam War and AIDS, about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poetry, War, Popular, Vietnam)

"Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poetry, Deep, Feeling, Help, Language)

"Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poems)

"I admired what my students were writing, but I think their improvement doesn't directly result from me but from being in a class, being with each other."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Being, Class, Improvement, Result, Students, Writing)

"I deliberately decided to write a kind of guide to leather bars for straight people, for people not into leather, so that people could see what it was all about."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: People)

"When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Fact, Sense, Shakespeare, Will)

"When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Being, Editors, First, Poems)

"When I first started teaching at Berkeley in 1958, I could not announce that I was gay to anybody, though probably quite a few of my fellow teachers knew."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: First, Gay, Teachers, Teaching)

"We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poems, Reading)

"As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Art, Treasure)

"We control the content of our dreams."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Dreams, Control, Content)

"My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poetry, Old)

"Many of my poems are not sexual."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poems)

"I deliberately wrote a poem in my last book where I was suggesting that there are other passions as great as or more important than the passion of sex."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Sex, Passion)

"I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Home, Self)

"I try not to observe myself in the process of composing a poem because I don't want to come up with a formula, which I would then be unscrupulous in using."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Formula, Want)

"We learned in the university to consider Wordsworth and Keats as Romantics. They were only a generation apart, but Wordsworth didn't even read Keats's book when he gave him a copy."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: University)

"It was difficult being a teacher and out of the closet in the '50s. By the time I retired, the English department was proud of having a gay poet of a certain minor fame. It was a very satisfactory change!"
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Time, Being, English, Fame, Gay)

"I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre."
- Thom Gunn

"I was reading the poems of Rochester. Rochester made himself out to be bisexual, but I think that was only to shock. Most of his poetry is sexual, even pornographic."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poetry, Poems, Reading)

"I was at a benefit for some imprisoned students in the '60s at San Francisco State, and there were lots of poets reading for the benefit: one was Elizabeth Bishop."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Poets, Reading, State, Students)

"I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Men, Being)

"I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Years)

"I notice that students, particularly for gay students, it's too easy to write about my last trick or something. It's not very interesting to the reader."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Gay, Students)

"I had assumed that I would age with all my friends growing old around me, dying off very gradually one by one. And here was a plague that cut them off so early."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Age, Dying, Friends, Old)

"I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Work)

"I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse."
- Thom Gunn
(Related: Sex, Self)