Time & Perspective Quote by Philip Pullman

Pullman’s line lands like a quiet demotion, and that’s exactly why it has bite. He isn’t confessing incompetence; he’s staging a refusal of self-mythology. “For a long time” suggests a youthful identity he inhabited sincerely, even romantically, before experience made the costume itch. The turn on “but” is the hinge: the sentence reclassifies “poet” from an activity into a social rank, “a high title,” with an implied gatekeeping committee of tradition, mastery, and time.

The subtext is less about genre than about authority. Pullman, a writer whose reputation is built on expansive storytelling and moral seriousness, acknowledges the cultural hierarchy that still hovers over “poetry” as the elite art of language. Calling it a “title” frames the label as earned rather than declared; it’s a pushback against the contemporary impulse to self-brand into legitimacy. There’s also a sly humility at work: by lowering his own claim, he raises the standard, making “poet” feel rarer and therefore more meaningful.

Context matters because Pullman’s public persona is both craft-forward and skeptical of institutional sanctity (religious, political, literary). The quote fits that temperament: reverence without piety. He respects poetry enough to be cautious around it, which doubles as an argument about writing itself - that the real measure isn’t what you call yourself, it’s what the work can bear. In an era of hot takes and instant canonization, Pullman’s restraint reads almost radical.