Parenting & Family Quote by Rita Dove

There is a quiet tragedy in how Rita Dove frames childhood writing as a phase you outgrow, like toys or fairy tales. The line doesn’t romanticize innocence; it exposes a cultural sorting mechanism. We train kids to make things, then steadily steer them toward “real” work, as if imagination is charming practice for adulthood rather than a serious adult capacity. Dove’s phrasing borrows the moral weight of “put away childish things” (the biblical echo is hard to miss), but she flips its usual lesson. The maturity script becomes a kind of vandalism: growth defined as narrowing.

The intent feels less like confession than diagnosis. Dove isn’t saying she lacked talent or desire; she’s describing an inherited assumption about legitimacy. Writing, in this telling, isn’t rejected because it fails her, but because it’s coded as childish, private, unserious. That’s the subtext: the arts often don’t lose to inability, they lose to respectability.

Context sharpens the bite. As a poet who would go on to become U.S. Poet Laureate, Dove embodies the rebuttal: the “childish” thing becomes a public vocation, a life’s work with civic weight. For many readers, especially those raised with a strong push toward practical achievement, the line lands as recognition. It names that moment when a creative impulse gets filed under “cute” and shelved. The power of the quote is its restraint: she doesn’t rage at the system; she simply shows how effortlessly it persuades you to abandon yourself.