Thoreau's original phrase in
Walden — the man who hears a different drummer — is itself a kind of prose poem, and any poet invoking march to a different drummer participates in this foundational American tradition of principled nonconformity;
A poem about an artist who refused to follow prevailing aesthetic fashions might use the phrase to celebrate the specific courage of
following an inaudible music — the risk of being
wrong, the greater risk of being right; In a poem about a
child who cannot seem
to march in step with their peers, march to a different drummer is both the parent's worried description and, retrospectively, the speaker's
recognition of
a gift that looked, at the time, like
a problem; A political poem about dissidents and resisters might use the phrase to
honor those who heard, in the midst of consensus, a beat that the majority could not detect — and who followed it at great personal cost; In a poem about musical culture — the jazz
musician, the folk singer, the experimental composer — march to a different drummer is both literal and figurative, the different beat the formal innovation that the poem celebrates; The phrase suits poems about the relationship between individual perception and collective rhythm, asking what it costs and what it gives to hear what others cannot — and to follow the inaudible music wherever it leads