War & Peace Quote by Thom Gunn

A poet is admitting, with a dry wince, that “popular” can be both an aesthetic category and a social reflex. Gunn’s line lands because it treats the poetry world like any other attention economy: themes trend, not just because they matter, but because they arrive carrying ready-made moral gravity. Vietnam and AIDS weren’t merely subjects; they were engines of witness, grief, and political clarity that could confer instant seriousness on a poem and instant legitimacy on a poet.

The phrasing “in the last few decades” quietly indicts literary fashion. Gunn doesn’t say poets have written about war and illness forever; he points to a recent pattern, a market of anguish where certain catastrophes become the sanctioned currency of depth. “Popular subjects” is the sly turn of the knife: it risks sounding tasteless, and that risk is the point. He’s prodding the reader to notice how quickly culture packages suffering into an acceptable repertoire of emotions.

Then comes the hedge that isn’t a hedge: “about both of which almost all of us have felt deeply.” Gunn grants the reality of feeling while questioning its collectability. “Almost all” keeps the door open for evasion, distance, and selective empathy - the people who felt deeply in theory but not in consequence. Context matters: Gunn wrote fiercely about AIDS from inside its devastation, and he lived through Vietnam’s cultural shockwaves. The subtext isn’t dismissal; it’s a warning that sincerity can become a genre, and that poetry’s moral appetite can start to resemble consumption.