Parenting & Family Quote by Anthony Hecht

The line cuts against the adult reflex to treat kids as fragile citizens of a sanitized republic. Hecht, a poet with a famously exacting ear and a biographical proximity to real horror (a WWII veteran who carried the war into his work), isn’t romanticizing darkness so much as refusing to pretend it’s an aberration. “It doesn’t seem to me strange” is the tell: a calm, almost conversational shrug that quietly indicts the people who do find it strange. The sentence is structured like a correction to respectable taste.

His triad - “the macabre, the sensational, and the forbidden” - maps a whole ecosystem of adolescent appetite. The macabre isn’t just gore; it’s the first encounter with mortality, a rehearsal for loss. The sensational is the body’s demand for intensity, the adrenaline that adult life eventually routinizes. The forbidden is the real engine: not simply “bad” content, but the thrill of testing boundaries and discovering that authority is, in fact, negotiable.

Hecht’s subtext is that children are already fluent in fear and transgression; adults are the ones performing innocence. The quote also doubles as a defense of art’s darker rooms. If young readers reach for Grimm, ghost stories, or lurid myths, it’s because those narratives offer a controlled danger - a symbolic space to handle what can’t yet be handled directly. Coming from a poet steeped in formal beauty and historical trauma, the observation lands as both permission and warning: repressing darkness doesn’t protect anyone; it just makes it harder to name.