Life & Wisdom Quote by Thom Gunn

Refusing to watch yourself write is a kind of artistic sabotage: Thom Gunn is describing a deliberate blindness that keeps the poem alive. The moment a poet starts narrating their own process, they start extracting “what works,” and what works hardens into a repeatable trick. Gunn’s line is blunt about the temptation: if he found a reliable method, he’d be “unscrupulous” enough to exploit it. That confession has bite. It’s not a saintly defense of purity; it’s an honest admission that craft can slide into hustle.

The subtext is a warning about self-consciousness as a factory for mannerism. When you “observe” yourself, you turn the poem into a product you can reverse-engineer, and the poet into a technician optimizing results. Gunn resists that managerial impulse. He wants the poem to stay partly illegible to its maker, because that illegibility is where surprise, risk, and genuine discovery live. A formula doesn’t just make writing easier; it makes the writer predictable, and predictability is the quiet death of attention.

Context matters: Gunn came up amid mid-century formalism and then leaned into freer, more intimate modes, always with a craftsman’s seriousness. This quote sits at the fault line between discipline and dependence. He’s not rejecting technique; he’s guarding against technique becoming a personality. The sly self-indictment - “I would then be unscrupulous in using” - is what makes the statement work: it frames originality not as a virtue, but as a daily act of resistance against your own worst efficiency.