I have believed for a long time that poetry is the deepest and the most compressed thing language can do, and that children's poetry is the gentlest corner of the whole literary world.
Reality is less encouraging. Walk through a bookstore, or look at what people around you actually read in a given week. The share going to poetry is small, and the share going to children's poetry rounds to nothing. People will spend the spare five minutes on trending topics, celebrity news, or the market. Almost nobody spends it on a short poem.
Why we stopped
The easy explanations are that life moved too fast and phones ruined reading. I don't think that's the root of it. The root is that we are still living in a period where functional need dominates almost everything.
Look at how books get bought. A parent picking one for a child asks whether it helps with essay writing, whether there's science in it, whether it will matter for school admissions. We do the same for ourselves — what problem does this solve, what does it get me. By that measure poetry is useless, and children's poetry is more useless still. It won't raise your income or your child's test scores.
Maslow is the usual shorthand here, and it's worth being honest that his hierarchy has held up poorly as a scientific model; people pursue meaning in the middle of deprivation all the time. But something in the neighborhood is real, and it shows up more clearly in the research on scarcity: when a person is preoccupied with money, security, or the fear of slipping, the preoccupation itself consumes cognitive bandwidth. It isn't that reading a poem is forbidden. It's that the mental room it requires has already been rented out.
This is why even comfortable people don't relax. In a society that stays competitive and uncertain, being financially fine is not the same as feeling safe, and someone whose nerves are up all day wants immediate emotional compensation — gossip, outrage, something that hits fast. Poetry asks for the opposite. It wants blank space and patience.
So in a society where most people are still working, earning, and holding a household together, stopping to look at a flower or read a children's poem gets quietly filed as a luxury. Sometimes as waste.
What AI might actually change
Will this shift? I think it might, and the odds aren't small.
Most AI today runs inside software and screens. As it moves into hardware and robotics — as it becomes embodied and starts acting in the physical world — it sets off a change in productive capacity rather than just in white-collar workflow. Physical labor, repetitive cognitive work, large parts of how goods and services get supplied: much of it can be taken over by machines and algorithms.
If the distribution of what that produces is handled well, a meaningful number of people could be released from anxiety about food, housing, and the rest. That is a real possibility, and it would be the first time in history the release was general rather than confined to an aristocracy.
I want to put weight on that conditional, though, because I slipped it past you in a subordinate clause and it is carrying the entire argument. "If distribution is handled well" is not a detail. It is the whole question, and nothing about the technology settles it. Productivity gains have landed unevenly before, and there is no law that says this round will be different.
The part that worries me more
Here is the objection I can't dismiss, and I'd rather raise it myself than have a reader raise it for me.
We have run this experiment already, at smaller scale. Rich countries today are wealthier and work fewer hours than any society in history. Poetry readership did not rise. It fell. The freed hours went to television, then to feeds, then to whatever is engineered to hold attention next. Material release turned out to be necessary for contemplation and nowhere near sufficient for it, because the moment attention is freed, an entire industry exists to capture it, and that industry is better funded and better instrumented than poetry has ever been.
There is a second wrinkle specific to this moment. A model will write you a hundred children's poems before breakfast, some of them decent. So poems are about to be the least scarce thing in the world. What stays scarce is the state of mind in which a person can sit with one — unhurried, undefended, willing to be moved by eight words about the sun. Supply was never the problem. It was always the reader.
None of this makes the hope wrong. It makes it a choice instead of a forecast. Machines can remove the reason we can't read poetry. They cannot supply the wanting to.
The measure of a civilization
Still, the soil matters. When survival stops being the sword over everyone's head, a society finally has the conditions for something other than utility — curiosity, beauty, the pleasure of a thought that leads nowhere useful. Those conditions don't guarantee the result, but without them the result is impossible.
"The sun fell into the water," "and turned into the sunset."
That is the kind of line a child produces without effort and without knowing it is any good. The unspoiled clarity in it is exactly what an affluent age would have the room to treasure, and exactly what a distracted one will scroll past.
How developed a society really is has never been readable from its GDP or the sophistication of its robots. It is readable from whether ordinary people in it have kept the habit and the inner quiet to read something with no use at all. Real abundance is a fullness in the mind and a sense of safety, not a number.
So my hope for the near future is modest. That once technology has taken the survival lock off the door, we sit back down — with a child, or alone — and read one short poem with nothing else running in the background. That may be the loveliest thing a civilization ever looks like.