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James Laughlin is most often acknowledged by the public as a publisher and seldom as a poet. Since he founded the publishing house New Directions in 1936, he has chosen to remain in the background of an effort which has placed before the public more than 1000 volumes of some of the best experimental and avant-garde writing of the last fifty years. When Yale University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1982, the citation praised him as an "Editor, poet, book collector, loyal friend of literature and the other arts," who had "created and sustained a publishing house of unique importance to contemporary letters." It went on to praise Laughlin's discernment of talent and his unflagging support of "literary endeavor."
Laughlin is perceived as a minor poet, in part because he has chosen to publish so little. In Another Country (1978), his collected poems, contains only fifty-eight pages of poems, a fact that Hayden Carruth attributes to "Laughlin's reticence in all personal matters." That Laughlin continues to apologize for his poetry is unfortunate, for it has been recognized as fresh, concise, full of wit, of impeccable quality, lucid, ironic, and often intense.
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