Thom Gunn

(272 votes)   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.

Thom Gunn

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(42 votes)   I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up.

Thom Gunn
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(36 votes)   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
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(19 votes)   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
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(18 votes)   Ginsberg's Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.

Thom Gunn
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(16 votes)   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
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(15 votes)   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
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(15 votes)   We tend to put poems into factions. And it restricts our reading.

Thom Gunn
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(14 votes)   I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.

Thom Gunn
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(14 votes)   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
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(14 votes)   My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.

Thom Gunn
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(14 votes)   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
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(12 votes)   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.

Thom Gunn
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(12 votes)   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
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(11 votes)   Edmund White said he thought coming out in public was good for any writer's work. It was for mine, because the subject matter is so much greater.

Thom Gunn
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