Parenting & Family Quote by Rita Dove

Dove’s line is a neat refusal of the priesthood model of literature, the one where credentialed adults hover above the culture, defining art from a safe height. “Come up and pontificate” isn’t just a jab at academics; it’s a critique of how institutions protect literature by embalming it. Her target is a familiar cycle: gatekeepers argue over canons, standards, and definitions while the audience for poems shrinks, then they mourn that shrinking as if it were weather.

The intent is practical and political. By redirecting attention to “children” and “teachers,” Dove shifts the argument from prestige to infrastructure. If you care what literature is, she implies, you should care how readers are made. Poetry in the curriculum “early” isn’t nostalgia for memorization or genteel appreciation; it’s a bet on habit formation. Early exposure makes poetry feel like a normal mode of thinking rather than a special-occasion artifact reserved for funerals, weddings, and standardized tests.

There’s subtext about access, too. Conversations about “what literature is” often smuggle in class and racial boundaries under the banner of taste. Dove, a former U.S. Poet Laureate who has navigated both elite literary spaces and public-facing cultural work, knows how definitions can become velvet ropes. Her prescription is democratic: treat poetry as a basic literacy, not an elective for the already initiated. The quiet provocation is that the future of literature won’t be won in essays about Literature, but in classrooms where a kid learns that their interior life can have rhythm, image, and authority.