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
Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
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
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 was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
Thom Gunn
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
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
Many of my poems are not sexual.
Thom Gunn
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
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
Related Authors
Lord Byron, Christina Rossetti, Samuel Butler, John Donne, Lascelles Abercrombie, Thomas Babington, Edith Sitwell, George Herbert, Carol Ann Duffy
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