Unexamined assumptions about poetry often go hand-in-hand with unexamined assumptions about childhood. Poets, like children, are thought to have access to some originary, mystical language of the unconscious. The language of poetry is thought to be" other" —archaic, grounded in rhythm and play, as Jacqueline Rose points out, in opposition to narrative fiction" as the forward progression of advancing literary form"(139). Poetry in contemporary America is considered a specialized language, something we often put away with childish things:

Classifying" otherness" in language as infantile or child-like reduces it to a stage we have outgrown, even if that stage is imbued with the value of something cherished as well as lost. In the end, the very association of linguistic rhythm and play with childhood becomes a way of setting the limit to what we are allowed to conceive of as a language which does not conform to the normal protocols of representation and speech.(Rose 139—40)