Love Quote by James Laughlin

Rereading, in Laughlin's telling, is less a study habit than a loyalty test: you return to the writers who made you, and the return itself becomes proof that the bond was real. The line is quietly polemical. It rejects the modern virtue of omnivorous, always-on consumption and replaces it with a canon built from intimacy. Taste, he implies, isn’t primarily curated by novelty or breadth; it’s forged early, then deepened by repetition.

The sentence structure performs that conviction. The drumbeat of "I re-read... I re-read... I re-read..". mimics the act: looping, insistent, almost devotional. He starts with "most people" to sound democratic, then slides into an unembarrassed autobiography. That move matters. Laughlin is a tastemaker as much as a poet (New Directions, Pound’s patron), and he’s modeling how cultural authority often works: not by claiming neutrality, but by foregrounding allegiance.

The named roll call is a tell. Pound, Williams, Thomas: modernism’s tensile line, American speech, and lyric intensity. Laughlin’s "formative stage" is a soft euphemism for a hard truth about influence: early encounters don’t just shape preference, they shape the equipment of perception. The subtext is both tender and slightly claustrophobic. Rereading keeps art alive, but it can also fossilize the self. Laughlin doesn’t resolve that tension; he normalizes it. For a poet and publisher who helped define a century’s "serious" literature, that normalization is the point.