Literary Birthday – 29 August – Thom Gunn
Thom Gunn was born on 29 August 1929 and died on 25 April 2004.
Thom Gunn Quotes
- As humans we look at things and think about what we’ve looked at. We treasure it in a kind of private art gallery.
- 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.
- 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.
- We control the content of our dreams.
- Deep feeling doesn’t make for good poetry. A way with language would be a bit of help.
Thom Gunn was an Anglo-American poet. His mother inspired a deep love of reading in him, including affection for the writings of Christopher Marlowe, Keats, Milton, and Tennyson, as well as several prose writers. Gunn who is well-known for The Man With Night Sweats, which focuses on the AIDS epidemic. He received the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize for the collection in 1993. His verse is notable for its adroit, terse language, and counterculture themes. He won numerous literary awards including the Levinson Prize, a Rockefeller Award, and the W. H. Smith Award. He was awarded fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur foundations.
Source for photograph: Poets.Org, Photo credit: Ander Gunn
by Amanda Patterson
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