Quotes from 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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

Many of my poems are not sexual.

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

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!

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

I was much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Direct me, gods, whose changes are all holy,To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly:Cool flesh of magic in each leaf and shoot,From milky flower to the black forked root.

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

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