Life & Wisdom Quote by James Laughlin

Laughlin’s line lands with the dry self-awareness of someone who built his life around the new and still suspects it might not be for him anymore. “One ages and one dates” is a neat, almost bookkeeping distinction: aging is biological, unavoidable; dating is cultural, a slow drift into yesterday’s fashions. He’s admitting that time doesn’t just wrinkle skin, it rearranges taste. The sting is that “dated” isn’t neutral. It’s a verdict the avant-garde hands down on anyone who fails to keep up.

The subtext is less “kids these days” than a confession of curatorial anxiety. Laughlin wasn’t only a poet; he was the founder of New Directions, the publisher who helped smuggle modernism into American letters. If you’ve spent decades championing innovation, you’re supposed to recognize the next wave on sight. His “difficulty in liking” new poets reads as a fear that the internal compass that once pointed toward the future has started to wobble.

What makes it work is the way he dodges grand claims and sticks to taste, that most personal and most political of faculties in literary culture. “Liking” sounds casual, even small, but in poetry it’s everything: the gatekeepers’ pleasure decides who gets printed, taught, funded, remembered. Laughlin’s understatement is a quiet acknowledgment of power and its erosion. The line carries a late-life honesty: the avant-garde eventually becomes an institution, and institutions are famously bad at recognizing the next disruption until it’s already a movement.