Life & Wisdom Quote by James Laughlin

Poetry, Laughlin suggests, is less a shared civic monument than a private frequency: you either tune in or you don’t. The line lands because it refuses the polite lie that taste is endlessly expandable. He doesn’t frame disagreement as a failure of education or sensitivity; he frames it as an almost bodily mismatch. “Such an individual thing” isn’t a kumbaya claim about subjectivity. It’s a quiet defense of selective ardor: the right poem doesn’t persuade you so much as it clicks.

The phrasing does a lot of work. Laughlin’s repeated “I mean” reads like conversational throat-clearing, but it also signals a modernist sensibility wary of grand pronouncements. He’s a poet, yes, but also a famously influential publisher (New Directions) who lived among reputations. That matters: this is an insider admitting that the canon doesn’t behave like a canon in the reader’s mind. Even among friends - the people you’re supposed to share culture with - the poets you revere can feel, to someone else, “ordinary and pedestrian.”

“Don’t say anything to me at all” is the key subtext. He isn’t accusing those poets of having nothing to say; he’s describing the experience of being untouched. The sting of “pedestrian” is strategic: it punctures the aura that surrounds certain writers and reminds us how quickly “important” can collapse into “flat” when language fails to make contact. In a literary world that often treats admiration as moral proof, Laughlin makes room for the heresy of not being moved.