Top 25 Thom Gunn Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.”

— Thom Gunn

2. “We control the content of our dreams.”

— Thom Gunn

3. “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.”

— Thom Gunn

4. “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

5. “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.”

— Thom Gunn

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

— Thom Gunn

7. “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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8. “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

9. “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

10. “Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.”

— Thom Gunn

11. “Ginsberg’s Collected Poems contains a wonderful poem about making it with Neal Cassady.”

— Thom Gunn

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

— Thom Gunn

13. “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.”

— Thom Gunn

14. “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

15. “My old teacher’s definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.”

— Thom Gunn

16. “I don’t know how to sit outside myself and test against a hypothetical self who stayed home.”

— Thom Gunn

17. “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.”

— Thom Gunn

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

— Thom Gunn

19. “I haven’t written anything in four years. I’m sort of dried up.”

— Thom Gunn

20. “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

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

— Thom Gunn

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22. “I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects.”

— Thom Gunn

23. “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

24. “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

25. “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

26. “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.”

— Thom Gunn

27. “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.”

— Thom Gunn

28. “Many of my poems are not sexual.”

— Thom Gunn