Art & Creativity Quote by Thom Gunn

Gunn’s “deliberately” is doing as much work as the rest of the sentence. It signals a pushback against the era’s easy conversion of liberation into a single storyline: sex as the master key to authenticity, politics, even art. Writing a poem “where I was suggesting” sounds modest, almost provisional, but the intent is pointed. He’s not denying sex’s force; he’s refusing its monopoly.

The subtext lands in the word “passions.” Gunn is after a hierarchy of energies: attachment, discipline, friendship, endurance, craft, even the stubborn will to stay intact. In a culture that often treats sex as either sin or salvation, his move is to widen the field without moralizing. “Other passions” implies an ecology of drives that can rival sex in intensity and consequence, and it hints at the costs of letting one appetite become the sole measure of a life.

Context matters because Gunn, a gay poet shaped by both British formalism and the American counterculture, wrote across the decades when gay male experience was alternately fetishized, pathologized, celebrated, then devastated by AIDS. Against that backdrop, insisting on passions “more important” reads as survival-minded. It’s a defense of the whole person: desire, yes, but also loyalty, attention, and the rigorous pleasures of making art. The line quietly argues that maturity isn’t repression; it’s proportion.