“What unites [Chuan's] lyric poems and his essay-poems is that they all carry a sense of the world's plentitude and of the world's puzzlement. The plentitude itself is bewildering and the bewilderment has a certain beauty.”
— Bookslut on Xi Chuan's Notes on the Mosquito
Lucas Klein
New Directions was founded in 1936, when James Laughlin (1914 - 1997), then a twenty-two-year-old Harvard sophomore, issued the first of the New Directions anthologies. "I asked Ezra Pound for 'career advice,'" James Laughlin recalled. "He had been seeing my poems for months and had ruled them hopeless. He urged me to finish Harvard and then do 'something' useful."