My father-in-law sent me a quote and asked me whether or not I thought it true. It seemed pretty straightforward, but I unpacked it over a run. I wrote him back but thought I’d share it here too.

When you re-read a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in yourself than there was before. -- Clifton Fadiman, editor and critic (1904-1999)
I think the quote can be true in that as you change and grow, your perspective on things changes, hence your interpretation and understanding of what the author is telling you may be different. The text itself is static and humans are not machines that produce the same output given the same input over their lifespan.

On a trivial level, I think you might see more in a book on a re-reading, since you may have glanced over a piece or been distracted by an outside disturbance (noise, music, anger, sadness, confusion, etc.).

I have certainly experienced having a passage with little importance to my view of the world on one reading, that turns out to be pivotal the next time I encounter it. Additionally, I think that some passages that I saw as sublime at one point have seemed less important, or even trivial, as I’ve aged.

I would add that there’s another option the quote doesn’t quite cover, namely a better understanding of the context in which the work was created. Knowing the times in which the work was written, the conditions of the people it references, the group of creators who the author worked with, etc. all can enhance an understanding of the text, i.e. find new meaning in the text. That isn’t really a question of something new in me, unless you’d argue that new knowledge in me is what the quote was trying to get at.

Poetry might be a different game altogether. I’ve been reading a lot of it lately, predominately the Romantics (Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, a little Byron). I reread several poems in the course of two weeks and each time, it seemed like I found something new in it. I think good poetry needs to unpacked, as there are often many levels of meaning. And sometimes the meaning is influenced by which poems precede and follow it. So, context matters a great deal in poetry, whereas in prose, you traditionally read linearly from beginning to end. I have read a poem that means one thing to me, but when I read it along with other ones next to it, it takes on a different meaning, maybe only fuller, but it’s different to me. There’s also understanding the “school of thought” writers, ones such as the Romantics who wrote together, or were followers of early Romantic poets. You can see threads, challenges and experiments in a new text. These things increase my understanding of the work, which isn’t really from inside me nor inside the static text.

I don’t reread stories that often. I’m slowly trying to get into that practice, especially as I get older. Perhaps looking for both more in the text and more in me. I reread Allen Ginsberg’s poem “Howl” every year. Each time, I feel like I find something new in it, but I also see how much I myself continue to change.

All in all, an excellent exercise.