Art & Creativity Quote by Dennis Potter

Potter’s line lands like a lament disguised as a shrug: the tragedy isn’t that kids can write poetry, it’s that most of them are trained out of it right on schedule. By framing it as an almost biological switch - puberty as the cutoff - he’s pointing to something more social than hormonal: the moment when self-consciousness arrives, when approval starts to matter, when earnestness becomes risky and “talent” gets sorted into winners and hobbyists.

The sly bite is in the clause “unless they’re poets.” It treats “poet” less as a job title than as a stubborn identity, the kind you keep only if you’re willing to be misunderstood. Everyone begins with permission to be lyrical; only a few retain it once the world starts demanding utility, status, and emotional restraint. Potter is diagnosing a culture that romanticizes childhood imagination while quietly building institutions - schools, peer groups, career tracks - that punish it. Poetry doesn’t vanish because the impulse dies; it vanishes because the costs of expressing it go up.

As a dramatist who often worked with memory, illness, and the brutal comedy of everyday life, Potter understood how quickly people learn to edit themselves. The line also doubles as an artistic manifesto: keep the child’s license to speak plainly about feeling, even when adulthood insists on irony, professionalism, or silence. Puberty becomes the first censorship, internalized and efficient.