Thom Gunn Quotes

Poets deal in writing about feelings and trying to find the language and images for intense feelings.

I like the way words go together and I like the gamesmanship of writing poetry. It is such a challenge.

Poetry is something I love to do. Good poetry has an amazing ability to be communicative before it's even understood. I get emotional just from the beauty of words.

A poem records emotions and moods that lie beyond normal language, that can only be patched together and hinted at metaphorically.

You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words.

I like poems that are complex.

The kinds of things that poetry can offer are timeless - mainly the kind of compression it offers of powerful language, powerful feelings and images, and, you know, the inner experience becoming outer.

When I first began writing, it was not in screenwriting but in poetry. That form was so evocative, all about the image and the emotion captured in a Polaroid-like smattering of words.

For poets today or in any age, the choice is not between freedom on the one hand and abstruse French forms on the other. The choice is between the nullity and vanity of our first efforts, and the developing of a sense of idiom, form, structure, metre, rhythm, line - all the fundamental characteristics of this verbal art.

I didn't read poetry seriously until college, when I really began to devour it in a very intense way. I also discovered that a poet is a maker. Before that, I thought a poet was someone who wrote about his own experiences.

I love to create interesting textures with language. You can do it as long as it seems like a discovery.

The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all.

The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.

A poet is, before anything else, a person who is passionately in love with language.

Poetry is the exquisite expression of exquisite expressions.

I must say, when I reread myself, it's the poetry I tend to look at. It's the most exciting to write, and it's over the quickest.

Poems - crystallizations of the universal play of analogy, transparent objects which, as they reproduce the mechanism and the rotary motion of analogy, are waterspouts of new analogies.

You take stuff from different places, and sometimes you stick a line in because it rhymes, not because it makes sense.

The more poetry you have in the head, the more poetry you will understand because you will be getting to the roots of what it is that makes people write poetry at all.

The object of poetic activity is essentially language: whatever his beliefs and convictions, the poet is more concerned with words than with what these words designate.

I'd like to go back to poetry again. I really, really revere good poetry. It's been my private discipline.

A novelist can get by on story, but the poet has nothing but the words.

Clarity, clarity, surely clarity is the most beautiful thing in the world, A limited, limiting clarity I have not and never did have any motive of poetry But to achieve clarity.

Poets go through a very tough apprenticeship in the use of words.

As a friendly one. I would still like to write concrete poems, but I can only do it sometimes.