Thom Gunn Quotes & Sayings

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many of my poems are not sexual. — Thom Gunn

The painter saw what was, an alternate
Candor and secrecy inside the skin. — 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

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

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

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

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

We control the content of our dreams. — Thom Gunn

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

Their relationship consisted
In discussing if it existed. — 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

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

While I don't satisfy my curiosity about the way I work, I'm terribly curious about the way other poets work. But I would think that's true about many of us. — Thom Gunn

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As if hands were enough
To hold an avalanche off. — Thom Gunn

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

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

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace. — Thom Gunn

Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly. — 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

One joins the movement in a valueless world, Choosing it, till both hurler and the hurled, One moves as well, always toward, toward. — 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 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

The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire,
pale antlers barely stirring
as he hunts. I cannot tell
what power is at work, drenched there
with purpose, knowing nothing.
What is a snail's fury? All
I think is that if later
I parted the blades above
the tunnel and saw the thin
trail of broken white across
litter, I would never have
imagined the slow passion
to that deliberate progress. — Thom Gunn