Life & Wisdom Quote by Thom Gunn

Gunn slips a small confession inside a larger, almost sociable shrug: the poet as both black box and amateur mechanic. The first move is disarming. He admits he can write without being able to fully account for how the writing happens, puncturing the romantic myth that artists possess privileged self-knowledge about their own “process.” Curiosity, in his telling, isn’t a path to mastery so much as a symptom of living with an instrument you can play but can’t quite take apart.

The subtext is a canny reversal of where authority sits. He’s “terribly curious” about other poets’ methods because other people’s habits can be narrated, inspected, even imitated; your own are partly invisible, folded into temperament, compulsion, and whatever private bargain you’ve made with language. There’s also a quiet ethical point: attention turned outward. Gunn, often associated with a disciplined, lucid style, suggests that craft is communal knowledge even when inspiration feels solitary. You study others not to steal their secret sauce but to triangulate your own.

That last line - “I would think that’s true about many of us” - is the social lubricant, but it’s doing real work. It pulls the confession away from vanity or mystique and frames it as a shared professional condition: poets as incessant readers of not just poems, but makers. In a twentieth-century literary culture increasingly allergic to grand declarations of genius, Gunn’s modesty reads as strategy: demystify the self, keep the work mysterious, and let curiosity remain the engine.