Aging & Wisdom Quote by Thom Gunn

Poetry, for Thom Gunn, isn’t an “expression” so much as a method: a disciplined reach toward clarity that never pretends clarity is guaranteed. Calling it “an attempt to understand” builds humility into the art form. The word attempt matters: it implies failure is not only possible but productive, that the poem earns its value by testing what the mind can hold rather than by delivering a neat conclusion. Gunn’s phrasing also slyly reframes the poet’s authority. The poet isn’t a sage handing down wisdom; he’s a worker in the same epistemic mess as everyone else, just willing to formalize the struggle.

The subtext is a quiet argument against both confessional gush and decorative verbal performance. Gunn, a poet famously attentive to form and to the body, suggests that technique isn’t a cage but an instrument of inquiry. Meter, line breaks, and image become thinking tools - ways to pressure an experience until it yields intelligible shape. “My old teacher’s” adds a lineage: this isn’t a private motto, it’s a transmitted ethic, a craft tradition that treats poems as acts of attention rather than acts of branding.

Context sharpens it. Gunn’s career moved between British formalism and the charged immediacy of mid-century America; later, the AIDS crisis shaped some of his most piercing work. In that terrain, “understanding” isn’t abstract. It’s grief trying to become legible, desire trying to be honest without becoming sentimental, a community trying to name what’s happening before it disappears. The definition’s power is its refusal of grandiosity: poetry as cognition under pressure, dignified by the fact that it keeps trying.