"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."

Poetry, War, Popular, Vietnam

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"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."

Exlpore more Poetry quotes

"I love writing poetry because it's pretty. I love writing pretty."

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Poetry, Beauty, Inspirational, Truth, Happiness

"A poet is not an inventor. A poet is a player that plays with words on the field of human imagination to excite a reader's mind with the colors of emotion."

Debasish Mridha, American Author

Poetry, Imagination, Words, Emotion

"Old wives keep in memory word of things that once were needful for the wise to know."

J. R. R. Tolkien, English Novelist

Poetry, Beauty, Peace, Happiness, Love

"Amore is loveconfessed to you in haiku.Do you love me too?"

Richelle E. Goodrich, American Poet

Poetry, Love, Inspirational, Happiness, Truth

"The lamp hummed:'Regard the moon,La lune ne garde aucune rancune,She winks a feeble eye,She smiles into corners.She smoothes the hair of the grass.The moon has lost her memory.A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,Her hand twists a paper rose,That smells of dust and old Cologne,She is aloneWith all the old nocturnal smellsThat cross and cross across her brain."The reminiscence comesOf sunless dry geraniumsAnd dust in crevices,Smells of chestnuts in the streets,And female smells in shuttered rooms,And cigarettes in corridorsAnd cocktail smells in bars."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poetry, Moon, Memory, Night, Nostalgia

"Poets are shameless with their experiences: they exploit them."

Friedrich Nietzsche, German Philosopher

Poetry, Experience, Truth, Emotion

"Poetry may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves."

T. S. Eliot, American Poet

Poetry, Time, Feelings, Being

"It is strange how a scrap of poetry works in the mind and makes the legs move in time to it along the road."

Virginia Woolf, British Author

Poetry, Movement, Memory, Time

"In a real poem a sound does not swallow a letter, but a letter swallows a sound."

Dejan Stojanovic, Serbian Philosopher

Poetry, Sound, Art, Expression, Creativity

"True poetry is the fragrance of the heart in the house of peace."

Sir Kristian Goldmund Aumann, British Musician

Poetry, Heart, Peace, Calm

Explore more quotes by Thom Gunn

"We control the content of our dreams."

Dream

"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."

Fact

"When I first started to write, I was aware of being queer, but I didn't write about it. Queer poems would probably not have been accepted by the editors I sent them to."

Being

"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!"

Time

"My old teacher's definition of poetry is an attempt to understand."

Poetry

"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."

Reading

"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."

Childhood

"I think most men, heterosexual and homosexual, enjoy being considered sexual objects."

Man

"I haven't written anything in four years. I'm sort of dried up."

Writing

"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."

Writing