18 Thom Gunn Quotes

Thom Gunn quotes

1. These seem like bristles, and the hide is tough. No claw or web here: each foot ends in hoof.

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

3. 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.

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

5. Distorting hackneyed words in hackneyed songs He turns revolt into a style, prolongs The impulse to a habit of the time.

6. My thoughts are crowded with death and it draws so oddly on the sexual that I am confused confused to be attracted by, in effect, my own annihilation.

1. 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.

2. 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!

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

4. We control the content of our dreams.

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

6. My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

7. 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.

8. As humans we look at things and think about what we've looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.

9. 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.

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.

11. 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.

12. I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.