Life & Mortality Quote by James Laughlin

"I think that concrete poetry seems to have, as far as I can see, come to a kind of a dead end. It doesn't seem to be going any further than it went in its high period of about five or six years ago"

James Laughlin, Poet

About this Quote

Dead ends are where movements go to be declared dead by people who benefited from them. James Laughlin, a poet and famously a tastemaker, delivers this assessment of concrete poetry with the cool finality of an editor closing a file: the “high period” is framed as a brief flare-up, and anything after it is diminished as mere afterglow. The phrasing matters. “Seems to have” and “as far as I can see” perform modesty while asserting authority; he’s not issuing a decree, he’s simply reporting the limits of his vision. That’s the subtextual power move: the canon as a sightline controlled by the one doing the looking.

Contextually, concrete poetry’s mid-century boom was tied to a particular technological and cultural moment: typography as spectacle, modernist confidence in form, and the thrill of the page becoming an image rather than a transparent vehicle. Laughlin’s “five or six years ago” situates it as trend-like, a minor avant-garde cycle rather than a durable paradigm. He’s also implicitly defending a different idea of poetic progress: that innovation must keep escalating, and that formal experimentation, once named and absorbed, risks turning into a repeatable style.

The intent isn’t just to critique a genre; it’s to police the boundary between experiment and gimmick. Concrete poetry, in this reading, has run out of surprise. What makes the quote work is its weary practicality: it treats artistic movements like markets with saturation points, and it reminds you how quickly the avant-garde can be historicized the moment it becomes legible.

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Topic	Poetry
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About the Author

James Laughlin (October 30, 1914 - November 12, 1997) was a Poet from USA.

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