Best 32 quotes of Thom Gunn on MyQuotes

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

As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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 think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

We control the content of our dreams.

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.

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

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.

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.

Outdoors next day, I was dizzy from a sense Of being ejected with some violence From vigil in a white and distant spot Where I was numb, into this garden plot Too warm, too close, and not enough like pain.

Your dying was a difficult enterprise. First, petty things took up your energies, The small but clustering duties of the sick, Irritant as the cough’s dry rhetoric. Those hours of waiting for pills, shot, X-ray Or test (while you read novels two a day) Already with a kind of clumsy stealth Distanced you from the habits of your health.