Thom Gunn Quotes

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Thom Gunn

Profession : Poet

Birth : August 29, 1929

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

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

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

Thom Gunn

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

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

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Thom Gunn

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

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

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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

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

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

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

Thom Gunn

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

Thom Gunn

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

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

Thom Gunn

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

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

Thom Gunn

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