Thom Gunn Quotes

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

Age, Friends, Old

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

Art, Treasure, Private

Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn

Good, Poetry, Help

Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.
Thom Gunn

Wonderful, Making, Poem

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

Writing, Result, Students

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

Write, Straight, Decided

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

Great, Sex, Important

I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
Thom Gunn

Home, Self, Against

I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
Thom Gunn

I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.
Thom Gunn

Four, Written, Dried

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

Gay, Easy, Write

I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
Thom Gunn

Men, Enjoy, Sexual

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

Try, Process, Using

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

State, Reading, Students

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

Influenced, Sartre

I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
Thom Gunn

Work, Best, Confident

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

Change, Time, Teacher

Many of my poems are not sexual.
Thom Gunn

My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn

Teacher, Poetry, Understand

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

War, Poetry, Two

We control the content of our dreams.
Thom Gunn

Dreams, Control, Content

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

Book, Him, Learned

We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
Thom Gunn

Put, Reading, 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

Gay, Few, Started

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

Write, Started, Aware

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Biography

Nationality: British

Type: Poet

Born: August 29, 1929

Died: April 25, 2004

Links

Find on Amazon: Thom Gunn

Cite this Page: Citation

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