Education Quote by Thom Gunn

The line punctures the tidy museum label of "Romanticism" with a poet's impatience for how culture gets filed. Gunn starts in the voice of institutional training: "We learned in the university..". That passive construction is doing work. It implies a curriculum that smooths over friction, teaching movements as if they were stable brands with a coherent roster. Then he drops the pin: Wordsworth and Keats, supposedly bound by the same category, were "only a generation apart", yet the older poet "didn't even read" Keats when handed a copy. The shock isn't the personal slight; it's what it reveals about how literary history actually moves.

Gunn is pushing back against the comforting fantasy of influence as a neat relay race. Real scenes of transmission are awkward, indifferent, competitive, or simply busy. The detail about the gifted book is almost comic in its deflation: the ceremonial gesture of continuity meets the banal fact of not bothering. In Gunn's hands, that banality becomes an argument. Period labels are retrospective convenience, created by critics and classrooms after the mess has cooled.

Context matters: Gunn, a mid-century poet shaped by both British tradition and American modernity, had reason to mistrust inherited categories. He watched "movements" get minted in real time, then hardened into syllabi. The quote isn't anti-Romantic so much as anti-pedestal: it insists that art history isn't a family tree, it's a social world, full of missed connections.