Quote

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

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Thom Gunn
Age: 74 †
Born: 1929
Born: August 29
Died: 2004
Died: April 24
Poet
Writer
Gravesend
Kent
Thomson William Gunn
William Guinneach Gunn
Must
Dare
Much
Machines
Men
Control
Taken
Imperfectly
Future
Manufacture
Natural
Routes
Use
Yield
Soul
Machine

More quotes by Thom Gunn

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I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
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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.
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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.
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Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
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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
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We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.
Thom Gunn
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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.
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My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
Thom Gunn
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I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
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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.
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Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
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I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
Thom Gunn
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I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.
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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
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I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
Thom Gunn
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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
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One is always nearer by not keeping still.
Thom Gunn
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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
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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.
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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