"When I began writing, I didn't read any other children's poets... I didn't want to be influenced until I'd found my own voice. Now I read them all"
About this Quote
Prelutsky’s confession has the refreshingly unromantic logic of craft: protect the weird little seedling of your own sensibility before you plant it in the crowded garden of influence. Children’s poetry is especially prone to “voice contagion” because its surface features are so mimicable - bouncy meter, bright rhymes, a certain wink-at-the-kid cadence. If you start by mainlining the classics, you risk producing competent pastiche: poems that sound like “children’s poetry” more than they sound like you.
The subtext is a quiet argument against the fetish of instant expertise. Prelutsky isn’t claiming purity; he’s describing a sequencing. First: discovery, the messy period where your ear forms and your humor sharpens without constantly being corrected by someone else’s template. Only after that comes apprenticeship in the broader sense: reading “them all,” not to copy, but to converse. The pivot in the second sentence matters. It reframes influence as something you can metabolize once you have a stable identity, not something that automatically dilutes originality.
Contextually, this tracks with how Prelutsky emerged as a defining voice in late 20th-century American kids’ lit - playful, musical, slightly anarchic, allergic to sentimentality. His work sits in a lineage (Silverstein, Dahl, Lear), but it doesn’t feel like an imitation of any one of them. The quote is also a practical permission slip for creatives: ignorance isn’t a virtue, but strategic isolation can be a tool. He’s describing how to build a voice sturdy enough to survive contact with the canon.
The subtext is a quiet argument against the fetish of instant expertise. Prelutsky isn’t claiming purity; he’s describing a sequencing. First: discovery, the messy period where your ear forms and your humor sharpens without constantly being corrected by someone else’s template. Only after that comes apprenticeship in the broader sense: reading “them all,” not to copy, but to converse. The pivot in the second sentence matters. It reframes influence as something you can metabolize once you have a stable identity, not something that automatically dilutes originality.
Contextually, this tracks with how Prelutsky emerged as a defining voice in late 20th-century American kids’ lit - playful, musical, slightly anarchic, allergic to sentimentality. His work sits in a lineage (Silverstein, Dahl, Lear), but it doesn’t feel like an imitation of any one of them. The quote is also a practical permission slip for creatives: ignorance isn’t a virtue, but strategic isolation can be a tool. He’s describing how to build a voice sturdy enough to survive contact with the canon.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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