Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn, born Thomson William Gunn, was an Anglo-American poet who was praised for his early verses in England, where he was associated with The Movement and his later poetry in America, even after moving toward a looser, free-verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use, sex and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth29 August 1929
With my creative writing students, I've taught literature more than I've taught writing courses'I just hope to make them better.
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.
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.
I work best in rhyme and meter. I was most confident of myself in that way.
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.
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.
One is always nearer by not keeping still,
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.
As if hands were enough To hold an avalanche off.
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.
Direct me gods, whose changes are all holy, To where it flickers deep in grass, the moly.
My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand.
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 much influenced by Jean-Paul Sartre.