Parenting & Family Quote by Tom Holt

Tom Holt’s line lands like a deadpan confession: poetry, framed not as a noble calling but as a “nasty childhood habit,” the sort of thing you’d rather not admit you ever did. The joke works because it flips the usual prestige hierarchy. We’re trained to treat poetry as refined, adult, culturally approved. Holt demotes it to the level of nail-biting or picking scabs, then claims he’s “grown out of” it with the smug relief of someone who finally stopped believing his own diary entries.

The intent is less anti-poetry than anti-pretension. “Childhood” isn’t just about age; it’s about a certain intensity of feeling and a belief that raw emotion, unfiltered, automatically equals art. Poetry becomes shorthand for earnestness without craft, the kind of overwrought self-mythologizing that many writers start with: dramatic metaphors, tragic moons, big declarations, no patience for structure. Calling it a habit implies compulsion, a phase you do because you can’t not, not because it’s good for you.

Context matters: Holt is a comic novelist with a reputation for agile, plot-forward storytelling. The line reads like a manifesto for prose that distrusts solemnity. It also winks at the literary ecosystem where “I used to write poetry” is a near-universal origin story. Holt turns that common biography into a punchline, suggesting maturity isn’t abandoning beauty, but learning to mistrust grand feelings until you can shape them into something sharper than a sigh.