39+ Thom Gunn Quotes On Education, Art And Culture

Thom Gunn was an English-born poet who wrote primarily in the late 20th century. He is known for his modernist style, which often reflected his experiences with drugs and other aspects of counterculture. His work often focused on themes of mortality, friendship, and identity. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Thom Gunn on education, art, culture.

Top 10 Thom Gunn Quotes

1. I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. I don't know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. Deep feeling doesn't make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
8. 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.
9. As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.
10. 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 Short Quotes

• I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
• As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.
• I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.
• I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.
• We control the content of our dreams.
• Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
• One is always nearer by not keeping still.
• My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
• The painter saw what was, an alternate Candor and secrecy inside the skin.
• I don't think of sex as a self-destructive impulse.

Thom Gunn Quotes About Poems

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

Many of my poems are not sexual. — Thom Gunn

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

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

Thom Gunn Famous Quotes And Sayings

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

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

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

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

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 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

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

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

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

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

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'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

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 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

Life Lessons by Thom Gunn

1. Thom Gunn's poetry often reflects his own life lessons, such as the importance of being open to change and the power of taking risks.
2. He also emphasizes the importance of accepting and understanding the complexities of life, and the need to embrace the unknown.
3. Through his work, Gunn encourages readers to find strength in vulnerability and to recognize the beauty of life's imperfections.