"They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet"
About this Quote
A quiet act of defiance hides inside the plainness of that sentence. "They think" sketches an entire social committee in three words: family, institutions, the small-town consensus that decides what a young woman is allowed to become. It also signals how expectation can feel like surveillance. Frame isn’t arguing with an individual; she’s up against a worldview that treats ambition as something to be corrected into usefulness.
The hinge is the contrast between "schoolteacher" and "poet". Teaching is respectable, legible, safely employed; it fits a narrative of feminine service and stability. Poet is the opposite: economically irrational, socially unruly, and, crucially for Frame, a claim to inner authority. The line doesn’t romanticize art so much as insist that vocation is not a permission slip issued by other people. It’s a self-determined identity, chosen even when it reads as impractical or even suspect.
In Frame’s life, that tension carries extra voltage. She trained as a teacher, then famously unraveled under pressure, misdiagnosed and institutionalized, nearly subjected to a lobotomy before her writing quite literally altered her fate. Read against that history, "I'm going to be a poet" becomes more than career preference. It’s a survival strategy: language as the place where she can be real, precise, and unowned.
The sentence works because it’s spare and unsentimental. No manifesto, no plea. Just a refusal to be misfiled. The confidence is almost audacious: she doesn’t ask to be seen; she declares what she is.
The hinge is the contrast between "schoolteacher" and "poet". Teaching is respectable, legible, safely employed; it fits a narrative of feminine service and stability. Poet is the opposite: economically irrational, socially unruly, and, crucially for Frame, a claim to inner authority. The line doesn’t romanticize art so much as insist that vocation is not a permission slip issued by other people. It’s a self-determined identity, chosen even when it reads as impractical or even suspect.
In Frame’s life, that tension carries extra voltage. She trained as a teacher, then famously unraveled under pressure, misdiagnosed and institutionalized, nearly subjected to a lobotomy before her writing quite literally altered her fate. Read against that history, "I'm going to be a poet" becomes more than career preference. It’s a survival strategy: language as the place where she can be real, precise, and unowned.
The sentence works because it’s spare and unsentimental. No manifesto, no plea. Just a refusal to be misfiled. The confidence is almost audacious: she doesn’t ask to be seen; she declares what she is.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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