"When I was an undergraduate I had very badly annotated editions of Shakespeare's sonnets, all of which left out the important fact that will has a sexual sense in Shakespeare's sonnets"
About this Quote
There is a deliciously pointed complaint hiding inside Thom Gunn's modest anecdote: the real scandal isn’t that students misread Shakespeare, it’s that their books were engineered to keep them from reading him properly. Gunn, a poet with a cool eye for how language works on the body, is calling out a tradition of “polite” scholarship that scrubs away sexual meanings and then congratulates itself for producing seriousness. The phrase “very badly annotated” lands like a dry slap; the editions didn’t just miss a footnote, they missed the poem’s engine.
His example is surgically chosen. “Will” in the Sonnets is not a quirky pun to be optionally mentioned; it’s Shakespeare’s favorite multi-tool: desire, intention, lust, and (often) Shakespeare’s own name all packed into one syllable. To omit the sexual sense is to flatten the sonnets into sanitized moral sentiments, turning erotic pressure into mere rhetoric. Gunn’s subtext: editorial discretion is never neutral. What gets annotated is what a culture permits itself to know.
The context matters, too. Gunn came of age when English literary study often wore chastity as a badge, while his own life and work moved through queer experience and the late-20th-century loosening of what could be said in public print. His gripe isn’t prurient; it’s ethical. If you can’t name what the word is doing, you can’t teach what poetry is: meaning made from risk, innuendo, and the friction between what society allows and what desire insists on saying anyway.
His example is surgically chosen. “Will” in the Sonnets is not a quirky pun to be optionally mentioned; it’s Shakespeare’s favorite multi-tool: desire, intention, lust, and (often) Shakespeare’s own name all packed into one syllable. To omit the sexual sense is to flatten the sonnets into sanitized moral sentiments, turning erotic pressure into mere rhetoric. Gunn’s subtext: editorial discretion is never neutral. What gets annotated is what a culture permits itself to know.
The context matters, too. Gunn came of age when English literary study often wore chastity as a badge, while his own life and work moved through queer experience and the late-20th-century loosening of what could be said in public print. His gripe isn’t prurient; it’s ethical. If you can’t name what the word is doing, you can’t teach what poetry is: meaning made from risk, innuendo, and the friction between what society allows and what desire insists on saying anyway.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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