Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Thom Gunn
Age: 74 †
Born: 1929
Born: August 29
Died: 2004
Died: April 24
Poet
Writer
Gravesend
Kent
Thomson William Gunn
William Guinneach Gunn
Lasts
Vietnam
Last
Aids
War
Popular
Felt
Decades
Two
Deeply
Subjects
Poetry
Almost
Hiv

More quotes by Thom Gunn

Image
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn
Image
I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
Thom Gunn
Image
Much that is natural, to the will must yield. Men manufacture both machine and soul, And use what they imperfectly control To dare a future from the taken routes.
Thom Gunn
Image
Thus for each blunt-faced ignorant one The great grey rigid uniform combined Safety with virtue of the sun. Thus concepts linked like chainmail in the mind.
Thom Gunn
Image
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
Image
I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
Thom Gunn
Image
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn
Image
I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Thom Gunn
Image
Many of my poems are not sexual.
Thom Gunn
Image
I'm not sure I had ever written a fan letter before to a poet I had not met, but that's what I did when I read two poems by Gregory Woods ... I admired them especially for their technical virtuosity, in that it was technique completely used, never for the sake of cleverness but as a component of feeling ... What an enviable talent Gregory Woods has
Thom Gunn
Image
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
Image
My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.
Thom Gunn
Image
How sociable the garden was. We ate and talked in given light. The children put their toys to grass All the warm wakeful August night.
Thom Gunn
Image
One is always nearer by not keeping still.
Thom Gunn
Image
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
Image
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
Image
A literary influence is never just a literary influence. It's also an influence in the way you see everything - in the way you feel your life.
Thom Gunn
Image
I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
Thom Gunn
Image
We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
Thom Gunn
Image
The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
Thom Gunn