Conformity

The whole premise of Baggott’s poem is that future poets are not like other people when they are young. Those people who are not poets do not let their minds drift; instead they do what is expected. They conform. But they are not poets, whose minds drift from lemons to their mother’s lemon-scented hands. Poets let their minds drift at school, as well. They do not conform, as other so-called good students do. Poets are not “attentive / to Mr. Twardus’s lectures on manliness,” nor are they “exacting of the apron hem” in home economics class. Poets do not conform in matters of love either. Poets fall more “deeply in love each time,” and they are impetuous as well, “hopping the fence to swim naked with a lover.”

Poets fail to conform in other ways...