Thom Gunn Quotes & Sayings (Page 3)

“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.”

“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.”

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”