literary essay on dead poets society

Dead Poets Society | Main Themes

Dead Poets Society is a timeless masterwork that still impacts readers’ mind. This essay examines the deep issues present in this literary masterpiece, providing readers with an insight into the thought-provoking concepts that enthrall readers of all ages.

Table of Contents

Main Themes

Seize the day – carpe diem:.

The core idea of this work is carpe diem, encouraging people to enjoy each moment. In today’s fast-paced world, this theme’s encouragement to live truthfully and seize life’s opportunities is still applicable. The novel’s characters struggle to follow their genuine inclinations and break away from societal expectations.

Conformity vs. Individuality:

A major subject that emerges throughout the story is the conflict between individuality and conformity. Readers are encouraged to consider the significance of remaining true to oneself as the characters negotiate the strict expectations of society and their families. Despite social pressure, this topic is a potent reminder to accept individuality.

Poetry and Literature’s Transforming Power:

This work highlights the transforming Power of poetry and Literature. Students learn how words can inspire, question, and stir thought from their lively English teacher, Mr. Keating. This theme invites readers to recognize the enormous influence that Literature may have on influencing viewpoints and promoting personal development.

Legacy and Influence:

The novel’s narrative is deeply entwined with the idea of legacy. The thought of making a lasting impression weighs heavily on the characters, and they start to doubt the direction others have set for them. This subject encourages readers to shape their futures by getting them to consider their own goals and the legacy they hope to leave behind.

Questioning Authority:

Dead Poets Society, questions the idea of deferring to authority without question. Motivated by Mr. Keating, the students challenge social norms and pose questions to those in positions of authority. This subject fosters a sense of autonomy and the bravery to question the current quo by challenging readers to assess the institutions around them critically.

A group of students at an all-boys prep school forms the Dead Poets Society under their English teacher’s influence, challenging traditional norms and exploring the power of poetry.

Carpe Diem,” or “Seize the Day,” is a famous line from this work, emphasizing the importance of living in the moment.

The melancholy in this work stems from the conflicts between the students and societal expectations, culminating in a tragic event.

The moral story of this work revolves around individuality, challenging conformity, and the impact of inspiring teachers on students’ lives.

N. H. Kleinbaum wrote the novelization of the movie, but the original screenplay for Dead Poets Society was penned by Tom Schulman.

In summary, “Dead Poets Society” offers a timeless examination of the human condition through its underlying themes. These themes, which include the appeal to seize the moment, the conflict between originality and conformity, and the transformational potential of literature, are relevant to all age groups.

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Dead Poets Society

53 pages • 1 hour read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-5

Chapters 6-10

Chapters 11-15

Character Analysis

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Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Discussion Questions

Summary and Study Guide

Introduction

N. H. Kleinbaum’s Dead Poets Society is a 1989 novel based on the motion picture written by Tom Schulman. The novel was released as a companion piece to the wildly popular film—also titled Dead Poets Society and released in 1989— which starred famous actors such as Robin Williams as Mr. Keating, and Ethan Hawke as Todd Anderson . The film scored high with critics, winning the Oscar in 1990 for Best Original Screenplay and receiving nominations for Best Picture, Best Actor (Williams), and Best Director (Peter Weir).

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The novel, like the film, follows a group of boys at an isolated preparatory school in Vermont, where excellence and uniformity are not just expected but commanded of them. Their worlds are changed when the new English teacher, Mr. Keating, arrives, bringing with him his unconventional methods of instruction. He teaches the boys to seize the day and make their lives extraordinary.

This guide is based on the original 1989 Hyperion copy of the novel, published for Touchstone Pictures.

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Content Warning: This book contains references to death by suicide and sexual assault, and uses outdated and culturally appropriative terminology that is reproduced only in direct quotes. 

Plot Summary

Tucked away in the hills of Vermont is a preparatory school designed to produce some of America’s best and brightest young male students: Welton Academy . The novel begins at the start of the fall term, when newcomer Todd Anderson is being inducted into the school. Todd is shy and fearful, always walking unnoticed in the shadow of his older brother, a legacy student at Welton. Other characters introduced in the convocation ceremony are future lawyer Knox Overstreet and future banker Charlie Dalton , both of whom are following in their fathers’ respective footsteps. Neil Perry , whose family is less wealthy than the others at Welton, is also present with his father, who is ever hard to please. Finally, the headmaster introduces the students and their parents to Welton’s newest addition to their staff: Mr. John Keating , the new English teacher.

Todd is set to room with Neil, a popular boy who is involved with several extracurriculars, including the school paper. While Todd is settling in, a number of Neil’s friends drop by and introduce themselves. Amidst the excitement, Neil’s father, Mr. Perry , enters and asks to speak with Neil. He tells him that he worries Neil is overloaded with extracurriculars and demands that he resign from the school paper. Neil begins to argue back, since he is the editor, but his father won’t hear any more of it, and Neil concedes. Neil’s friends tease him for being a pushover, but he reminds them that they all act the same way with their own fathers.

Welton (nicknamed “Hellton” by the students) proves to be even more challenging than Todd expected, and he finds himself struggling to keep up with the high expectations the school sets for its students. The teachers in Latin, trig, and other subjects begin the semester with mountains of homework assignments. It isn’t until the boys find themselves in Mr. Keating’s class that they feel they can breathe for a moment.

Mr. Keating, a young man in his thirties, sits in the classroom, staring out the window. Finally, he introduces himself and asks to either be addressed as Mr. Keating, or “O Captain! My Captain!”, in reference to the Walt Whitman poem. Then, he gets up and leads the boys to a hallway that is lined with photographs of students from the past several decades. He asks them to lean in closer and see that they aren’t much different from the students at Welton today. He asks them to consider how many of them actually followed their dreams and how many followed the path life seemed to have carved out for them. He encourages the boys to remember a particular Latin phrase: “carpe diem,” which translates to “seize the day.”

That night, Knox has to decline the boys’ offer to have a group study session. He has been instructed to have dinner with the Danburrys, his father’s friends. Knox initially dreads the appointment, but his attitude changes when he is greeted at the door by a beautiful girl named Chris. Knox is immediately enraptured with the pretty cheerleader but is crushed to discover that she is dating Chet Danburry, the son of his father’s friends. He returns to the boys that night with the tragic news: He’s met the most beautiful girl, but she’s taken.

The following morning, Mr. Keating’s class again proves to be unconventional. Mr. Keating asks his students to read the introduction to their assigned poetry book aloud. The introduction, authored by Dr. J. Evan Pritchard, claims that poetry can be ranked in a type of mathematical scale, one that accounts for a poem’s technical skill and its importance to the world at large. After deducting these two figures, one will arrive at a measurement of a poem’s greatness. Mr. Keating, after demonstrating this graph, turns to the class and declares the entire formula to be absurd. This is no such way to measure a poem’s greatness, as if a thing could be measured at all.

He commands his students to rip out the entire introduction and throw it away. They will be studying poetry differently in this class, and have no need for Dr. J. Evan Pritchard. The boys are hesitant at first, unsure of why they could be asked to destroy the book. Eventually, one by one, they rip the pages gleefully. They lean on the edge of their seats as Mr. Keating talks about the beauty and romance of poetry—both of which are essential to their understanding as members of the human race.

In the dining hall later that day, Mr. Keating is joined at his table by McAllister, the Scottish Latin teacher. McAllister inquires about the odd scene he happened to witness earlier that morning: He had seen the students ripping out the introduction to the book. He warns Mr. Keating against encouraging the boys to be artists. Mr. Keating replies that he isn’t trying to create artists but free thinkers. McAllister scoffs slightly at the idea but overall is charmed by Keating’s enthusiasm and lets the topic rest.

Meanwhile, Neil has found something of interest at his own lunch table. He shows the boys a school annual from the year Mr. Keating graduated. Under his picture, he is listed as the founder of the Dead Poets Society. After lunch, they follow Mr. Keating outside and ask him what the Dead Poets Society was. Mr. Keating tells them it was a group of boys who met in an old cave near the school grounds and took turns reading poetry aloud.

When they return to their dorms, Neil finds an old book of poems on his desk, presumably left there by Mr. Keating, with an inscription next to a Henry David Thoreau quote, saying that this was to be read at the first meeting of the Dead Poets Society. Neil gathers a group of boys and gets them to agree to meet in the cave that night and bring back the Dead Poets Society. The group consists of Knox, Charlie, and three other boys: Cameron (albeit unwillingly at first, for he is afraid to break the rules), Pitts, and Meeks.

Finally, Neil asks Todd to join. Todd tells Neil he can’t because he’s too afraid to speak in front of the others, and the whole point of the Society is for them to take turns reading aloud to each other. Neil leaves to ask the others if Todd can listen instead and still be involved. His request is granted, and Todd is in the club. They plan to leave that night and sneak out for the cave.

As the Dead Poets Society continues to meet, reading poems and confessing secrets, and Mr. Keating continues to teach against the dangers of conformity, the boys slowly begin to find their own voices. They grow brave in their pursuit of what they want: Neil discovers his passion for acting, auditioning for and landing the role of Puck in the local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and Knox grows more courageous in his attempts to woo Chris. Todd, who the whole time has feared public speaking more than anything, is pulled in front of Mr. Keating’s class to create a poem on the spot, and his words leave his classmates speechless. The friendship between the boys grows, and they discover they have dreams, ideas, and words to share with the world beyond what they’ve been conditioned to contribute by their fathers and the professors at Welton.

Eventually, Mr. Perry discovers that Neil is in the play and that he faked a permission slip from himself and Headmaster Nolan to participate. He tells his son that he must drop the show immediately. Neil visits Mr. Keating to tell him of his problem. He confides in his teacher that he feels trapped by his father’s expectations and isn’t sure how to move forward. Mr. Keating encourages Neil to tell Mr. Perry what he just told Mr. Keating: that his passion for acting is more than a hobby and he wants to pursue it. Neil agrees to think on it. When Mr. Keating asks him later if he followed up with his father, Neil lies and says that Mr. Perry was angry but agreed to let him remain in the production.

Meanwhile, Knox rides his bike to Chris’s school and delivers a love poem to her in front of her entire class. She shows up the night of Neil’s play at Welton to warn Knox that her boyfriend is furious and that he needs to stay away from her for his own safety. As it happens, Chris is on her way to the play as well, alone, and Knox convinces her to come with him. He promises one night to spend time together, and if she still doesn’t want to see him again, he will leave her alone for good. She agrees, and the two of them sit together in the auditorium.

Neil performs beautifully, and all of his friends are in the audience to cheer for him. An unexpected audience member arrives toward the end of the show: Mr. Perry. Neil sees him in the crowd but continues his final speech. Afterward, Mr. Perry takes Neil home, leaving the boys and Mr. Keating confused and worried for Neil.

At home, Mr. Perry informs Neil that he will be withdrawn from Welton and shipped off to military school for the remainder of his high school years. From there he will go to pre-med and medical school, a total of 10 years of his life that will be spent studying something Neil doesn’t want to do. Mr. Perry reminds Neil that he has no say in the matter and that he and his mother are counting on Neil to be successful and wealthy. Without another word, the family goes to bed.

That night, feeling like there is no way out of his situation, Neil sneaks down the stairs into his father’s study, where a pistol is locked in the desk drawer. He puts on the crown he wore as Puck, points the gun at himself, and fires. His parents awaken to the noise and rush down the stairs to find their son, dead on the floor of the study.

Back at Welton, the boys wake Todd up from his sleep to deliver the news. Todd wretches from grief, and the boys cling to each other as they mourn their friend. Todd blames Mr. Perry, saying Neil would never have done it if Mr. Perry hadn’t pressured him as much. Neil’s death launches a school-wide investigation, with the blame ultimately falling on Mr. Keating and the Dead Poets Society. Schools close because of situations like this, and Headmaster Nolan needs a scapegoat. The easiest target is the teacher who has been giving the boys the courage to find their own voice .

Cameron, a rule-follower at heart, is the first to confess. Charlie, disgusted and angered by Cameron’s betrayal, punches him square in the face. Cameron looks around at his friends and tells them that if they don’t confess, they risk expulsion. Mr. Keating will be fired either way, but they can still save themselves. One by one, the Dead Poets are called in to talk about their experience in Mr. Keating’s class and what happened in the cave. Only Charlie refuses to speak, and is expelled immediately. Finally, Todd is called into Mr. Nolan’s office. There, his parents are waiting for him, and there is a contract detailing what happened that has been signed by the Dead Poets (with the exception of Charlie). Todd begs his parents not to make him sign, but eventually he is forced to comply.

The next day, Headmaster Nolan takes over for Mr. Keating in poetry class. He decides that it would be best to start over, so he tells the boys to read aloud from the introduction. They tell him that the pages have all been ripped out. Frustrated, Headmaster Nolan plops his own copy of the book before one of the students and forces him to read. At that time, Mr. Keating appears to gather his belongings. Headmaster Nolan tells him to go ahead. The room is morose as they watch their beloved teacher pack up his materials.

As Mr. Keating is walking out of the room, Todd stands up and shouts for him to wait. He tells him that they were all forced to sign the papers and they know it wasn’t his fault that Neil died. Headmaster Nolan commands Todd to sit back down. However, in a moment of final defiance, Todd instead stands on his desk and faces Mr. Keating. Knox joins, and Pitts, and Meeks. Eventually, nearly half of the class (even those who weren’t in the Dead Poets Society) all stand on their desks as a salute to Mr. Keating: an alliance with the man who changed their lives. Mr. Keating smiles back at them and thanks them. Though they may never cross paths again, none of them will forget the man who allowed them to, for once in their life, think for themselves.

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A Reflection on the Movie “Dead Poet’s Society”

History constantly witnesses the never-ending struggle between tradition and innovation. As an old adage goes, “the only constant thing in this world is change” and it is indeed true. The society that we have today is a by-product of continuous changes changes that generations before us believed to be for the better. Thus, history serves as a “storehouse” of information that can help us understand change and how the society we live in came to be. The definition of History as a “natural tension between tradition and Innovation” Is best represented in the movie Dead Poet’s Society.

Set in 1959, the movie is the story f students at the respected “Walton Academy”, an all-boys preparatory school In Vermont. Such schools were (and often still are) very conservative institutions that serve as high schools for parents who Insist on sending their children to the best universities. The story is an all-common scene in our history. A traditional way of living and doing things is initially present. Almost everyone is conforming to that tradition since it is the “best” way people know on how to do things.

Not everybody may be happy but the familiarity that the tradition brings provides comfort and security. Then come long a different (either good or bad) Idea to change how things are originally done. The traditionalists will resist and even condone the change while the proponents of Innovation will try to prove that the change Is for the better. The changes may persist in a particular society, and as the time goes on, these changes will be embedded on the culture until it becomes the new tradition, which new changes will, again, try to contest.

And again, the whole cycle begins. In the movie, the tradition is represented by the educational system where students memorized and translated the central works of the distant past, learning ancient engages, rhetoric, and simple mathematics by rote. Professors emphasized accuracy and not comprehension. Conservative and conformist, Walton, like any other early colleges had little Interest either In expanding knowledge or in Inciting critical thinking. Lessons were infused with a deeply religious vision of the world and of the duties both as a citizen and as a family-member.

The colleges saw themselves as bulwarks against change, training the pastors, doctors, and lawyers of the next generation. Largely driven by a sense of tradition, the school Imposes out-dated teaching techniques on both its teachers and its students. The students are encouraged to mindlessly take in facts and regurgitate them on command. The teachers are expected to teach according to a rigid set of rules. But change arrived regardless, driven by the needs of a growing society. The innovation in the movie is represented by John Keating, the newest professor at other professors at the academy, Keating actually speaks to the students.

So unique and out of the ordinary are his words that the students are awe-struck, and uncertain how to respond. Whereas other teachers merely lecture and delegate, Keating pushes his students to be involved, to think, to use their minds. He believes that education requires the student to think for himself. He emphasized that the students must be free to question and to learn in the way that they learn best. He also wants to ensure that they really learn to experience life, to “suck the marrow” out of it.

Through this encouragement, he was able to reach his students like none of the teachers before him did, though few schools accept the basic premise of his teachings and Walton Academy is no exception. Coming into conflict with John Seating’s motivating speeches about finding one’s own voice are years of tradition, involving both the academy and the families whose hillier attend the academy. These two irrepressible forces (Seating’s innovative way of teaching and Welter’s traditional system of education) are destined for a collision, which is brought about by this age-old conflict of traditional compulsion versus freedom and flexibility.

Keating rejects tradition and refuses to teach by the old methods. The school refuses to accept change. And so the battle begins. Seating’s first act of business is to ask one of the students to read the first four lines of Robert Hayrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” the most famous “carper mime” or “seize the day” poem in English: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may: / Old time is still a-flying; / And this same flower that smiles today, / Tomorrow will be dying. ” Keating follows this up with a reminder that we are “food for worms. This is a somewhat unorthodox invocation of the time-honored adage about life being too short. It is certainly appropriate for a teacher to use this perhaps unusual but highly effective method to drive home the point that young people are only young for a “short” time and that they should thus make the most of their time by seizing the day, thus making their “lives extraordinary. The fact that all this takes place in front of a class picture of a long-ago student body on the wall (the members of which are by that time probably all dead) Just delivers the point Keating is making with that much more relevance and effectiveness.

In the scene where Keating asks the students to tear the pages out of their textbook, we witness the second major scene involving Seating’s ingenious and most effective teachings methods. Part of the secret of Seating’s success with his students is, of course, the fact that he levels with them, that he tells them (and occasionally shows them, too) what he firmly believes is the truth. The essay, “Understanding Poetry,” by J. Evans Pritchard, Ph. D. , is indeed “excrement” (to use Seating’s own characterization of it).

The “greatness” of a poem is not to be grafted onto horizontal and vertical lines where the first represents the “perfection” (as to rhythm, meter, and rhyme) and the second the “importance” (as to theme) of a given poem. As Keating tells the students after they have torn the offending pages from the book, “we don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the engineering, these are all noble pursuits, and necessary to sustain life.

But poetry, tatty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. ” It is in the next classroom scene that Keating performs his famous stunt of standing upon the desk to remind the students that – as he puts it – we “must constantly look at things in a different way. ” “Just when you think you know something,” he tells them a moment later, “you have to look at it in another way. ” He urges them to think when they read “not Just what the author thinks. Consider what you think” as well. He urges them, too, to find their own voices.

There is no time to waste. The more habitual their thinking becomes, the more difficult it will be to change it later on. It is interesting to reflect in this connection on the fact that both George McAllister, a fellow teacher, and Mr.. Nolan object (the first mildly, the second vehemently) to Seating’s attempt to make 17-year-olds think for themselves. On the other hand, the case of Neil (one of Seating’s students) and his father represents an altogether different standpoint on how we can view tradition and innovation.

It is a tradition during that time for a child to follow his parents (father, in particular) regardless of the child’s personal preference. In the movie, Nil’s relationship with his father is a case of misunderstanding and lack of immunization. Mr.. Perry wanted what was best for his son, which led to extremely high expectations. Neil wanted to find out who he was and what he wanted to do. Neil was unable to discuss his opinions and options with his father, and Mr..

Perry was unwilling to look at Nil’s outlook on life, as it did not appear as Neil had a concrete idea of what he wanted to do. This cyclical pattern led Neil to conclude that suicide was the only way to gain control of his life and stand up to his father. Mr.. Perry was a traditionalist, which unfortunately meant he had a difficult time expressing affectionate emotions. He also had a large number of expectations because like any parent, he ultimately wanted the best for his son, a 16-17 year old with a bright future ahead of him.

Unfortunately, Neil never really saw or understood that his father only wanted what was best for Neil. He only saw the tyrant-like authority figure who constantly demanded that Neil achieve greatness in academia and who obeyed him unquestioningly. In this situation, the father and son were like strangers, each with a specific perception of the other, but neither really knew who the other was. This perpetuated the cycle of misunderstandings between the two and eventually played a major role in Nil’s suicide.

At that moment, it is evident that Neil is not happy with the traditional way his father treats him. He wanted a change, but he never really stood up to his father. There were times he tried, like when Mr.. Perry told Neil he should drop some extracurricular activities, but he did so in the presence of others, which created a hostile environment between the two. The story of Nil’s life would have been different if he was Just brave and innovative enough to think of ways on how he an positively affect his father’s belief without antagonizing him.

It would have been what Neil wanted and what they could do to compromise. Nil’s situation is an example where change is inevitable. But the inability of the characters to cope with these changes led to their own destruction. In general, we can say that while we have held fast to our common values as a society and as an individual, the one true constant in this world has been that of creative change. If our institutions hope to remain relevant to our society and to our state, this tradition of adaptation and evolution must continue.

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"Dead Poets Society" is a collection of pious platitudes masquerading as a courageous stand in favor of something: doing your own thing, I think. It's about an inspirational, unconventional English teacher and his students at "the best prep school in America" and how he challenges them to question conventional views by such techniques as standing on their desks. It is, of course, inevitable that the brilliant teacher will eventually be fired from the school, and when his students stood on their desks to protest his dismissal, I was so moved, I wanted to throw up.

Peter Weir's film makes much noise about poetry, and there are brief quotations from Tennyson, Herrick, Whitman and even Vachel Lindsay, as well as a brave excursion into prose that takes us as far as Thoreau's Walden. None of these writers are studied, however, in a spirit that would lend respect to their language; they're simply plundered for slogans to exort the students toward more personal freedom. At the end of a great teacher's course in poetry, the students would love poetry; at the end of this teacher's semester, all they really love is the teacher.

The movie stars Robin Williams as the mercurial John Keating, teacher of English at the exclusive Welton Academy in Vermont. The performance is a delicate balancing act between restraint and schtick.

For much of the time, Williams does a good job of playing an intelligent, quick-witted, well-read young man. But then there are scenes in which his stage persona punctures the character - as when he does impressions of Marlon Brando and John Wayne doing Shakespeare.

There is also a curious lack of depth to his character compared with such other great movie teachers as Miss Jean Brodie and Professor Kingsfield. Keating is more of a plot device than a human being.

The story is also old stuff, recycled out of the novel and movie " A Separate Peace " and other stories in which the good die young and the old simmer in their neurotic and hateful repressions. The key conflict in the movie is between Neil ( Robert Sean Leonard ), a student who dreams of being an actor, and his father ( Kurtwood Smith ), who orders his son to become a doctor and forbids him to go onstage. The father is a strict, unyielding taskmaster, and the son, lacking the will to defy him, kills himself. His death would have had a greater impact for me if it had seemed like a spontaneous human cry of despair, rather than like a meticulously written and photographed set piece.

Other elements in the movie also seem to have been chosen for their place in the artificial jigsaw puzzle. A teenage romance between one of the Welton students and a local girl is given so little screen time, so arbitrarily, that it seems like a distraction. And I squirmed through the meetings of the "Dead Poets Society," a self-consciously bohemian group of students who hold secret meetings in the dead of night in a cave near the campus.

The society was founded by Keating when he was an undergraduate, but in its reincarnate form it never generates any sense of mystery, rebellion or daring. The society's meetings have been badly written and are dramatically shapeless, featuring a dance line to Lindsay's "The Congo" and various attempts to impress girls with random lines of poetry. The movie is set in 1959, but none of these would-be bohemians have heard of Kerouac, Ginsberg or indeed of the beatnik movement.

One scene in particular indicates the distance between the movie's manipulative instincts and what it claims to be about. When Keating is being railroaded by the school administration (which makes him the scapegoat for his student's suicide), one of the students acts as a fink and tells the old fogies what they want to hear. Later, confronted by his peers, he makes a hateful speech of which not one word is plausible except as an awkward attempt to supply him with a villain's dialogue. Then one of the other boys hits him in the jaw, to great applause from the audience. The whole scene is utterly false and seems to exist only so that the violence can resolve a situation that the screenplay is otherwise unwilling to handle.

"Dead Poets Society" is not the worst of the countless recent movies about good kids and hidebound, authoritatian older people. It may, however, be the most shameless in its attempt to pander to an adolescent audience. The movie pays lip service to qualities and values that, on the evidence of the screenplay itself, it is cheerfully willing to abandon. If you are going to evoke Henry David Thoreau as the patron saint of your movie, then you had better make a movie he would have admired. Here is one of my favorite sentences from Thoreau's Walden, which I recommend for serious study by the authors of this film: " . . . instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them." Think about it.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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Film credits.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

130 minutes

Josh Charles as Knox Overstreet

Dylan Kussman as Richard Cameron

Robert Sean Leonard as Neil Perry

Robin Williams as John Keating

Gale Hansen as Charlie Dalton

Ethan Hawke as Todd Anderson

Produced by

• Tony Thomas
• Steven Haft
• Paul Junger Witt
• Maurice Jarre
• William Anderson

Directed by

• Tom Schulman

Photography by

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Dead Poets Society Is a Terrible Defense of the Humanities

The beloved film's portrayal of studying literature is both misleading and deeply seductive.

I’ve never hated a film quite the way I hate Dead Poets Society . I expect that them’s fighting words, at least in some quarters; at least I hope they are. Because I’m trying to pick a fight here.

I was in the last year of my English literature Ph.D. program in the summer of 1989, when Dead Poets Society was released. My younger brother Scott, who really didn’t have the money to spare, slipped my wife, Robyn, and me a 10-dollar bill (these were simpler times) and told us he’d watch our kids so we could go out to see it. No one in my family quite understood what I wanted to do for a living or, having finished my bachelor’s degree, why I’d spend seven more years in school to do it; but having seen Dead Poets Society , Scott believed he finally had an idea of what I wanted to do with my life, and more important, why.

We went to the movie and watched, often swept up in the autumnal New England beauty of Welton Academy (the real-life St. Andrew’s School, in Middletown, Delaware). But I walked out horrified that anyone would think that what happens in Mr. Keating’s classroom—or outside of it, because so many of his poetry-derived “life lessons” are taught outside the classroom, after all—had anything to do with literary study, or why I was pursuing a graduate degree in English. I think I hate Dead Poets Society for the same reason that Robyn, a physician assistant, hates House : because its portrayal of my profession is both misleading and deeply seductive. For what Keating (Robin Williams) models for his students isn’t literary criticism, or analysis, or even study. In fact, it’s not even good, careful reading. Rather, it’s the literary equivalent of fandom. Worse, it’s anti-intellectual. It takes Emily Dickinson’s playful remark to her mentor Thomas Higginson, “If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry,” and turns it into a critical principle. It’s not.

Now don’t get me wrong. I’m all for passion in the literature classroom. Harvard poetry professor Helen Vendler uses two lines from Wordsworth’s The Prelude as the title for an essay about teaching: “What we have loved, / Others will love …” That second line concludes, “and we will teach them how.” That’s how I teach, or hope to teach: with my heart on my sleeve, perhaps, but with my brain always fully engaged. I’m fortunate to do what I love for a living, and I know it. That’s how I was taught, in high school especially. I’m an English professor today because I had Mr. Hansen in ninth grade, and Mr. Jackson in eleventh.

But passion alone, divorced from the thrilling intellectual work of real analysis, is empty, even dangerous. When we simply “feel” a poem, carried away by the sound of words, rather than actually reading it, we’re rather likely to get it wrong. We see Mr. Keating, in fact, making just this kind of mistake during one of his stirring orations to the boys of Welton. In a hackneyed speech about resisting conformity that he seems to have delivered many times before, Keating invokes that oft-invoked but rarely understood chestnut, “The Road Not Taken”: “Robert Frost said, ‘Two roads diverged in a wood and I / I took the one less traveled by / And that has made all the difference.’”

Wha—? Has Keating actually read the poem from which he so blithely samples? For Robert Frost said no such thing: a character in his poem says it. And we’re meant to learn, over the course of that poem, that he’s wrong—that he’s both congratulating and kidding himself. He chooses his road ostensibly because “it was grassy and wanted wear”; but this description is contradicted in the very next lines—“Though as for that, the passing there / Had worn them really about the same,” and—more incredibly still—“both that morning equally lay / In leaves no step had trodden black.” He wants to claim to have taken the exceptional road, if not the spiritual high road; but he knows on some level that it’s a hollow boast.

Keating hasn’t actually read “The Road Not Taken” in any meaningful sense; rather, he’s adopted it, adapted it, made it his own—made it say what he wants it to say. His use of those closing lines, wrenched from their context, isn’t just wrong—it’s completely wrong, and Keating uses them to point a moral entirely different from that of Frost’s poem. (In a like manner, how often has Frost’s “The Mending Wall” been quoted out of context in debates about immigration reform? “Good fences make good neighbors,” indeed.)

The film’s anti-intellectualism is both quite visceral and quite violent. When his students first sit down with their new poetry anthology, Keating tricks a student into reading aloud a few sentences from the banal introduction written by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D.—a cartoonish version of academic criticism that opens with a split infinitive!—before instructing them to tear those pages out of their books. (Though generic-sounding, the essay’s title, “Understanding Poetry,” mischievously nods to the most influential poetry text of the 20th century, Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren’s Understanding Poetry [1938].) Although he employs mock-heroic terms, Keating makes it clear that they’re fighting for their spiritual lives:

This is a battle. A war. And the casualties could be your hearts and souls. Armies of academics going forward measuring poetry. No! We’ll not have that here: no more Mr. J. Evans Pritchard. [Notice how he’s just been stripped of his professional credential.] Now in my class you will learn to think for yourselves again. You will learn to savor words and language. No matter what anybody tells you, words and ideas can change the world.

Their textbook now purged of any taint of critical thought, the students are freed to enjoy an unmediated encounter with poetry in the raw.

This style of working with poetry—what’s sometimes termed poetry “appreciation,” as distinct from poetry criticism—is the m.o. of the Dead Poets Society, Welton’s bookish version of Yale’s Skull and Bones. Mr. Keating explains the purpose of the group to his inner circle of students in a conspiratorial whisper:

The Dead Poets were dedicated to sucking the marrow out of life. That’s a phrase from Thoreau we would invoke at the beginning of every meeting. A few would gather at the old Indian cave and read from Thoreau, Whitman, Shelley, the biggies—even some of our own verse—and in the enchantment of the moment we’d let poetry work its magic … We were Romantics. We didn’t just read poetry, we let it drip from our tongues like honey.

(“We would invoke ”? “Our own verse ”? Who’s writing this stuff?)

If the Welton School officials and parents suspect that Mr. Keating is leading his students astray, Pied Piper-like, there is at least something to that charge. Or rather, he’s sending them astray, without ever really leading them. The first meeting of the reconvened society ends with one of the students reciting Vachel Lindsay’s notorious 1919 poem “The Congo,” a text whose racial politics are ambiguous at best; about it, W.E.B. DuBois wrote, “Mr. Lindsay knows little of the Negro, and that little is dangerous.” Whatever the poem’s real or intended politics, the spectacle of an all-white clique of prep-school boys capering out of a cave into the night while chanting the poem’s refrain (“THEN I SAW THE CONGO, CREEPING THROUGH THE BLACK, / CUTTING THROUGH THE JUNGLE WITH A GOLDEN TRACK”)—well, shudder . Shades of “What Makes the Red Man Red?” from Disney’s Peter Pan . The setting, after all, is the “old Indian cave.”

For all his talk about students “finding their own voice,” however, Keating actually allows his students very little opportunity for original thought. It’s a freedom that’s often preached but never realized. A graphic example is presented in one of the film’s iconic moments, when that zany Mr. Keating with his “unorthodox” teaching methods suddenly leaps up onto his desk. Why? “I stand on my desk to remind myself that we must constantly look at things in a different way,” he helpfully declaims. How bold: He’s standing perhaps two and a half feet off the ground. Ralph Waldo Emerson, in his essay “Nature,” had made the same point rather more radically, suggesting that one “Turn the eyes upside down, by looking at the landscape through your legs.”

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Keating then has the boys march up to the front, of course, and one by one and two by two they mount his desk and they, too, “look at things in a different way”—exactly the different way that he has. After each has experienced this “small alteration in [his] local position” (Emerson), he steps or leaps off the desk, as if a lemming off a cliff: Keating’s warning, “Don’t just walk off the edge like lemmings!” unfortunately serves only to underscore the horrible irony of this unintended dramatic metaphor. Even when the students reprise this desktop posture at the film’s close, in a gesture of schoolboy disobedience (or perhaps obedience to Keating), we realize that while the boys are marching to the beat of a different drum, it’s Keating’s drum. Or they’re dancing to his pipes.

One of the strangest things about watching the film again, 25 years on—for while I’ve long loathed it, until now I’d never actually revisited it—is that I now find myself sympathizing not primarily with the plucky and irreverent John Keating, but to a surprising degree with his “old fart” colleagues whom I’m clearly supposed to find benighted. (It’s also a revelation to watch a young Ethan Hawke, before he could really act—and a young Robert Sean Leonard [Dr. Wilson on House ], before he couldn’t.) Smarmy to the end, Keating, when interrogated about his teaching antics by the school’s headmaster, quips, “I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself.” The film gives us no evidence that he’s done this for Neil, Todd, Knox, and Charlie. And while too cynical by half, the headmaster’s response is one with which I sympathize a good deal more now than I did back then: “At these boys’ age? Not on your life. Tradition, John. Discipline. Prepare them for college and the rest will take care of itself.” On some level, Keating is a Lost Boy who refuses to grow up. It’s hard to forget, in this connection, that Williams went on to play Peter Banning/Peter Pan two years later in Steven Spielberg’s parental guilt-fueled remake of that story, Hook .

Why does all of this matter? In part, because Dead Poets Society might well be the most enduring and beloved picture ever made about teaching the humanities. While many English professors dislike and distrust the film, there’s another large contingent, even among those who teach literature in high school and college, that loves it. And I’m not deaf to its charms. Compared to his colleagues, Mr. Keating is a thrilling teacher, a breath of fresh air, and rightly beloved. The rote repetition and memorization taking place in adjoining classrooms makes his teaching seem quite vibrant.

But while avoiding the pitfalls of dull pedagogy, Keating doesn’t finally give his students anything in its place besides a kind of vague enthusiasm. Next door, Mr. McAllister’s students are declining Latin— Agricolam, Agricola, Agricolae, Agricolarum, Agricolis, Agricolas, Agrilcolis ; out in the hallway, in front of the trophy case and faded photographs of old Weltonians, Keating preaches it. “Carpe diem,” he entreats, during their first class period together.

With its 25th anniversary nearly upon us, the enduring popularity of Dead Poets Society —voted the greatest “school film” ever made, and often named by viewers as one of the most inspirational films of all time, according to a 2011 piece in The Guardian —has a great deal, I believe, to tell us about the current conversation concerning the “crisis in the humanities.”

Certainly it has been an interesting few years for humanists. Since the economic downturn of 2008, enrollments in humanities courses across the country have declined; at the same time—the flip-side of the coin—colleges and universities are seeing a sharp increase in students majoring in those disciplines which, rightly or wrongly, are thought to ensure better employment prospects at the conclusion of one’s studies. This titanic (if cartoonish) battle, often characterized as STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) versus humanities—Big Science, little man—has been splashed across the higher-education and broader popular press, and has clearly captured the public imagination. The headlines in the Chronicle of Higher Education suggest the contours of the “crisis”: “ The Humanities’ Value ” (“Why should society support the humanities when so many people are suffering from the effects of the economic crisis?”); “ In the Humanities, How Should We Define ‘Decline’? ” (“Colleagues nationwide were stunned to learn a few weeks ago that a French department and four other humanities departments at SUNY-Albany were being sacrificed for their ‘underperformance’”); and even “ It’s Time to Stop Mourning the Humanities ” (“As we are forced to sell out to corporate models of higher education, let’s at least be sure to sell high”).

In the conversation about the fate of the humanities, these disciplines are often caricatured to the point of being unrecognizable to those of us in the component fields. The most alarming version—one, I’m arguing, that has been propagated by Dead Poets Society —is what I’ve taken to calling “sentimental humanities”: humanities content stripped of all humanities methodology and rigor. This is a feel-good humanities—the humanities of uplift. The film is of no help as we try to find our way out of our current standoff—and to the degree that it unconsciously stands in for humanities pedagogy and scholarship, it does real damage. I believe, in particular, that there are two fundamental problems with allowing this Dead Poets Society, sentimentalized version of the humanities to serve as our model for what it means to be deeply and passionately engaged in the study of music, art, language and literature, history, philosophy, religion—of human culture. Call them resistance and acceptance.

Though few will say so publicly, there are those with a stake in the debate who resist granting a greater role in contemporary higher-ed curricula to the humanities. When they resist, it’s often the sentimental humanities that they’re resisting: the conception that the humanities, as a group of disciplines, is more about feeling than thinking. That the humanities is easy, a soft option; that the humanities doesn’t train thinkers. Or more often, and more explicitly, that the humanities don’t train employees. North Carolina governor Pat McCrory made headlines last year by telling the state’s high-school seniors, “If you want to take gender studies that’s fine. Go to a private school, and take it. But I don’t want to subsidize that if that’s not going to get someone a job.” Even our president, with a social science degree (political science) and two years at a liberal arts college (Occidental), has repeatedly trumpeted the importance of technical education and vocational training. Though he’s since apologized , humanists across the country groaned when Obama quipped, at a General Electric plant in Wisconsin on January 30, that “folks can make a lot more, potentially, with skilled manufacturing or the trades than they might with an art-history degree.”

Oh: and that it’s the refuge of narcissists. No matter the text that he’s ostensibly engaged with, Mr. Keating, like Hamlet in Stéphane Mallarmé’s wonderful description, is forever “reading in the book of himself.” This is what Keating’s namesake John Keats (referencing Wordsworth) called the “egotistical sublime.” Recently, some pioneering work in neuroscience has begun to suggest what English teachers have long known: that the power of literature is the power of alterity, creating the possibility of encountering the other in a form not easily recuperable, not easily assimilable to the self. “Imaginative sympathy,” we used to call it. To read literature well is to be challenged, and to emerge changed.

But for Keating, it’s the text (like Frost’s poem) that is changed, not the reader. He does the same thing to the Whitman poem “O Me! O Life!” that he recites to his students. Used as the voiceover for a recent iPad ad , Mr. Keating’s pep talk quotes the opening and closing lines of the poem, silently eliding the middle: “Oh me! Oh life! / of the questions of these recurring, / Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish, /… / What good amid these, O me, O life? // Answer. // That you are here—that life exists and identity, / That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.” He’s quoting from Whitman, he says, but the first line he omits is telling: “Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?).” Go back and add that line to the quotation and see how it alters the whole. For Keating—and one fears, examining the scant evidence the film provides, for his students—every poem is a Song of Myself. This, then, is what’s at stake in Keating’s misreadings—I’m not interested simply in catching a fictional teacher out in an error. But he misreads both Frost and Whitman in such a way that he avoids precisely that encounter with the other, finding in poetry only an echo of what he already knows—what he’s oft thought, but ne’er so well expressed.

And when advocates for the STEM fields do make room at the table for the humanities, it’s too frequently this toothless, much-diminished variety they have in mind. Keating says, “We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute.” But I fear that too often, when we do find a place for the humanities in the curriculum, we do so precisely because they are. Cute. Because they make us feel all warm and fuzzy.

The last time our country experienced a “crisis in the humanities,” it coincided precisely with the rise of (largely Continental) literary theory in U.S. English and comparative literature departments in the 1970s and early ’80s. David Richter cleverly calls his classroom anthology of these theoretical readings Falling into Theory , for there’s a fully developed narrative of Edenic purity and postlapsarian cynicism that lies just beneath the surface of the public backlash against the ascendancy of literary theory.

So if, by one logic, the humanities is dismissed as too lightweight, in another they’re banished unless they bear themselves modestly, “come / on little cat feet.” The humanities fell from grace, then, as an unfortunate consequence of its politicization and turn to theory. In this narrative, the “crisis” in the humanities is wholly of its own making: It’s our own damn fault.

In the humanities, unlike the other branches of higher learning, any amount of analysis is liable to be dismissed as “paralysis by analysis” (in the way Keating dismisses Dr. J. Evans Pritchard’s critical method as “measuring poetry”). Those making such a charge might invoke these lines from Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned”: “Our meddling intellect / Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:— / We murder to dissect.” These lines (especially the last) are much more familiar than the poem from which they’re taken. But I’ve pulled a Keating on you: I’ve taken them out of context, for the first line of the quatrain is, “Sweet is the lore which Nature brings.” Wordsworth suggests that we murder not literature, but nature, with our “meddling intellects” (in order, paradoxically, to create literature in the first place). If Wordsworth and the Romantics sometimes argue for an anti-intellectual (or merely non-intellectual) relationship to nature, they never offer this as a theory of reading, as Keating consistently does.

But many people like misreading “The Tables Turned,” and like their poetry, as the Car Talk guys would say, “unencumbered by the thought process.” There’s a reason there’s no Dead Novelists Society: for poetry, in the public imaginary, is the realm of feeling rather than thinking, and the very epitome of humanistic study. To understand how preposterous and offensive this stipulation is, turn it around. Imagine what would happen if we suddenly insisted that physics professors were ruining the beauty and mystery and wonder of the natural world by forcing students memorize equations. Or if we demanded that the politics department stop teaching courses in political theory.

The resistance to the humanities: In one of its guises, that of Dead Poets Society, it finally comes down to a preference for fans over critics, amateurs over professionals. Everyone engaged in the debates swirling around the humanities, it seems, is willing to let humanists pursue their interests as amateurs, letting “poetry work its magic … in the enchantment of the moment.” Some of those who wish us well—so long as it doesn’t cost them anything, in terms of faculty lines, or course enrollments, or research funding—enjoy a fan’s relationship to the humanities themselves, and at best hope for the same for their students.

Scholars and teachers of the humanities, however: We will insist on being welcomed to the table as professionals.

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One of the classic films about poetry, Dead Poets Society stars Robin Williams, Robert Sean Leonard, and Ethan Hawke. Directed by Peter Weir ( Picnic at Hanging Rock, Green Card, Master and Commander ), Dead Poets Society is set in the late 1950s in an East Coast boys' prep school, Welton Academy. Robin Williams plays the school's new English teacher and Welton alumnus, John Keating, who inspires his students to love poetry, and to live life to its fullest potential.

After discovering that their new teacher was once a member of the Dead Poets Society, a secret society that met and read poetry, Keating's students decide to resurrect the group. They begin sneaking off to the woods late at night to read Frost , Tennyson , and other poets, and in doing so learn to appreciate great poetry and form deep friendships.

Poetry is read and discussed throughout much of the film; a central scene involves a performance of Shakespeare 's A Midsummer Night's Dream and poetry recitations are sprinkled liberally throughout the movie. One of the most memorable scenes depicts the students' defiant recitation of Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" to their beloved teacher. Winner of the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor, Dead Poets Society is a moving story about gaining the freedom to be oneself in the face of adversity.

Directed by Peter Weir (1989). Rated PG.

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Essay about Dead Poets Society: Film Analysis

Anyone can prepare themselves to become a stronger writer. It takes practice and self motivation to proceed in the process to get better. It’s not easy, but with determination it can be accomplished. In the film, Dead Poets Society, a new English teacher, John Keating, uses atypical methods of teaching to reach out to his students at an all-boys preparatory academy. Through his lessons, his students learned to overcome the pressures from their families and school and tried to pursue their dreams.

In “Part 3” of Cal Newport’s, How to Become A Straight-A Student, Newport provides tips on how students can prepare themselves to write powerful essays. The film can translate well into the book written by Newport because students can use the themes presented in the movie to help them overcome obstacles in the writing process. Writing has roadblocks like life, we have to conquer it to improve. While the objective from Dead Poet’s Society differs from “Part 3” of Cal Newport’s, How to Become a Straight-A Student, it can be implied that the power to becoming a strong writer is to overcome obstacles.

Sometimes it’s hard to keep an open mind for new ideas, but exploring and discovering different perspectives can help benefit the grade you receive on your paper. It will spark the audience’s interest because of the engagement of a divergent outlook. In the film, Keating says, “I stand upon my desk to remind myself… that we must constantly look at things in a different way. The world looks very different from up here… Just when you think you know something you have to look at it in another way… When you read, don’t just consider what the author thinks, you must consider what you think” (Weir, Dead Poets Society).

He stands on the desk to emphasis how looking at things from another viewpoint can change a person’s perspective. There isn’t only one way to look at ideas and objects. For your paper, try and find a unique perspective of your own and write your thesis. If you need help, don’t be afraid to ask. Sometimes a seed is needed to help you get started. Ask for opinions from your friends and professors. As stated in the text, “[They] will help you identify pieces of your structure that are unclear or unnecessary” (Newport 185). A perspective can be compared to a thesis.

It will change and evolve as you continue in the paper-writing process (Newport 157). It’s inevitable, just like how it’s inevitable for perspectives to stay the same. Don’t wait too long to get started, find your own standpoint and just write your thesis. Your thoughts matter. Once a standpoint is found, your voice needs to be heard. Building up the courage to express oneself through words will be beneficial and helpful in the process of becoming a strong writer. In the film, Keating is teaching his students that they do not need to be resigned to what the author thinks.

He tells his students, “You must strive to find your own voice. Because the longer you wait to begin, the less likely you are to find it all” (Weir, Dead Poets Society). This quote conveys that it’s best not to wait too long to find the courage to find your own voice and express it. This is similar to “Part 3” when Newport quotes a straight-A student saying, “I don’t believe in sitting in front of a blank screen and just starting to write, hoping it will come to you” (Newport 141). Waiting for ideas to come to you will waste your time.

You have to do whatever it is necessary to get the creative juices flowing. To become a powerful writer, a student must prepare to present their ideas in their own voice. You don’t get better overnight. Newport writes, “the hard truth is that the only way to get better at organizing and presenting your thoughts is through practice” (Newport 175). You get better as you practice. Writing may be intimidating, but taking the time to practice can help you improve. Making the most of the present time can help your paper become extraordinary.

In the film, on the first day of class, Keating takes his students out to have their lesson in the hallway, instructing them to observe the pictures on display because, even though they’ve passed it many times, they haven’t really looked at it. He tells his students, “Seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary” (Weir, Dead Poets Society). His message was to make the most of their lives, leave behind a legacy, because eventually death will come. When you are writing, you should limit your distractions and focus on the task at hand.

Making the most of your time will result in more work being completed. In “Part 3,” Newport states, “The key to effective paper writing is breaking down tasks into manageable units” (Newport 144). He is conveying that breaking down the writing process will be more organized and efficient than rushing to get it done. Once you’re done with the draft of your paper, come back to the thesis. “Don’t be afraid to leave room for ambiguity” (Newport 157). Be vague with the thesis. In life, students may not know how to become extraordinary and it’s okay to not know.

There is a broad list of opportunities. They will get there, but they have to take the steps towards that goal or find a way to get there. Writing a great paper doesn’t come to a person all at once, creating productive steps can help get to that level of work. However, if steps are made and there is no time being spent to complete them, it’s useless. Use your time wisely and your paper can become extraordinary. You don’t need to be a superhero to become a strong writer. The power is already in you, you have to find it and bring it out.

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box for ideas, it will help bring attention to your paper. Once your ideas are found, use your own voice to express it in your writing. You don’t have to be resigned to a certain way of thinking. Make sure to spend time on writing your paper. Ideas will only be ideas if you don’t do the work. It may seem impossible to write an amazing paper right off the bat, but make it possible by practicing. You become a strong writer as you overcome the roadblocks. It’s only impossible if you don’t make it possible.

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Dead Poets Society

N. h. kleinbaum, ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

As its boarding school setting would suggest, Dead Poets Society is in large part a novel about education. The book articulates two competing theories about how young people should be educated: first, the process of rote memorization and blind obedience practiced by most teachers at Welton Academy (the “Welton way”); second, the process of training students to think for themselves (the “Keating way”).

At Welton, students are trained to obey authorities and internalize whatever knowledge their teachers deem fit to pass on to them. According to the “Welton way,” education consists of an older, more experienced teacher passing on specific information to a classroom of younger, relatively inexperienced students. Therefore, the ideal Welton student will obey authority without question, memorizing Latin, trigonometry, history, etc. But although the Welton way defines education as the internalization of specific pieces of information, education itself is just a means to an end: i.e., a way for Welton students to go to a good college and later get a good job. The Welton way isn’t designed to foster any real passion for knowledge whatsoever; rather, it’s designed to produce graduates who will go on to make lots of money.

The “Keating way” of educating students, by contrast, is designed to get young people to think for themselves. Content-wise, Keating’s classes stress the idea that a “good life” must be structured around one’s unique passions, not society’s rules. Similarly, Keating’s theatrical, sometimes over-the-top methods push students to think originally and independently. He lets his students stand on desks , walk around the schoolyard, yell in class, and generally break out of their old, familiar habits at school. The goal of these seemingly frivolous exercises is to train students to “un-learn” their blind obedience to Welton, and to authority in general. Keating believes that students have innate passions and talents—his job, then, isn’t to pass on information to his students, but rather to help them cultivate the abilities they already have.

As many critics have pointed out, however, it’s not clear that Keating really trains his students to think for themselves at all. He tries to use humor, performance, and wit to train his students to think freely, but it seems likely that he’s just training his students to worship him. It’s telling that the novel shows Keating analyzing specific poems only once—he claims that he wants his students to love poetry, but in fact, he seems to want his students to love him . In short, one could argue, Keating’s students become blindly loyal to Keating where before they were blindly loyal to Welton. While such an interpretation of Dead Poets Society may be beyond Kleinbaum’s authorial intent, it’s important to keep in mind. There is a potential contradiction in the notion of teaching students to think originally (how can you teach originality?), and at times, Keating seems to fall prey to such a contradiction, his theatricality as much of a barrier to free thought as the other Welton teachers’ dullness.

Education ThemeTracker

Education Quotes in Dead Poets Society

Sixteen-year-old Todd Anderson, one of the few students not wearing the school blazer, hesitated as the boys around him rose to their feet. His mother nudged him up. His face was drawn and unhappy, his eyes dark with anger. He watched silently as the boys around him shouted in unison, “Tradition! Honor! Discipline! Excellence!”

The audience rose to a standing ovation as the octogenarian haughtily shunned offers of help from those beside him and made his way to the podium with painstaking slowness. He mumbled a few words that the audience could barely make out, and, with that, the convocation came to an end.

As the other boys stared at him, Todd fought back tears. “You'll like soccer here, Anderson. All right, boys. Dismissed.”

He jumped dramatically onto his desk and turned to face the class. “O Captain! My Captain!” he recited energetically, then looked around the room.

Did most of them not wait until it was too late before making their lives into even one iota of what they were capable? In chasing the almighty deity of success, did they not squander their boyhood dreams? Most of those gentlemen are fertilizing daffodils now!

Keating grabbed onto his own throat and screamed horribly. “AHHHHGGGGG!!” he shouted. “Refuse! Garbage! Pus! Rip it out of your books. Go on, rip out the entire page! I want this rubbish in the trash where it belongs!”

He stood silent at the back of the room, then slowly walked to the front. All eyes were riveted on his impassioned face. Keating looked around the room. “What will your verse be?” he asked intently. The teacher waited a long moment, then softly broke the mood. “Let's open our texts to page 60 and learn about Wordsworth's notion of romanticism.”

“Ah,” McAllister laughed, “free thinkers at seventeen!” “I hardly pegged you as a cynic,” Keating said, sipping a cup of tea. “Not a cynic, my boy,” McAllister said knowingly. “A realist! Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams, and I'll show you a happy man!”

Todd stood still for a long time. Keating walked to his side. “There is magic, Mr. Anderson. Don't you forget this.” Neil started applauding. Others joined in. Todd took a deep breath and for the first time he smiled with an air of confidence.

“There is a place for daring and a place for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for.” Keating said. “But I thought …” Charlie stammered. “Getting expelled from this school is not an act of wisdom or daring. It's far from perfect but there are still opportunities to be had here.”

“Talk to him, Neil,” Keating urged. “Isn't there an easier way?” Neil begged. “Not if you're going to stay true to yourself.”

“Damn it, even if the bastard didn't pull the trigger, he …” Todd’s sobs drowned his words until, finally, he controlled himself. “Even if Mr. Perry didn't shoot him,” Todd said calmly, “he killed him. They have to know that!”

“Cameron's a fink! He's in Nolan's office right now, finking!” “About what?” Pitts asked. “The club, Pitts. Think about it.” Pitts and the others looked bewildered. “They need a scapegoat,” Charlie said. “Schools go under because of things like this.”

As Nolan started down the aisle toward him, Knox, on the other side of the room, called out Mr. Keating's name and stood up on his desk too. Nolan turned toward Knox. Meeks mustered up his courage and stood up on his desk. Pitts did the same. One by one, and then in groups, others in the class followed their lead, standing on their desks in silent salute to Mr. Keating.

Dead Poets Society

By peter weir, dead poets society quotes and analysis.

But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you. Go on, lean in. Listen. You hear it?... Carpe... Hear it?... Carpe. Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary. John Keating

This quote demonstrators that Keating appreciates the history and legacy of Welton as much as his fellow faculty members, but that rather than let it intimidate his students, he uses it to inspire them. His view appears to be that the boys should follow in the footsteps of those who came before them not because tradition is the best course of action, but because they are all members of the human race, and the passion and excitement for life that they all share is what makes them special.

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. John Keating

One of the movie’s most famous quotes, Keating here acknowledges that many of his students may not care about his preaching about the humanities. After all, Welton prides itself on its ability to churn out doctors, lawyers, and other well-respected professionals. Intuitively, many of its current students are on the path to these careers and so don’t need art and poetry to succeed. Keating therefore reminds the students of why they’re doing what they’re doing, and working as hard as they are. He introduces the radical notion that they’re prestigious and impressive future careers may not actually be the end goal of their lives, but rather the means to living as full a life as possible.

This is a battle, a war, and the casualties could be your hearts and souls. John Keating

A somber moment of foreshadowing, Keating unknowingly references the eventual loss of Neil’s life in this quote. While his words “battle” and “war” refer to many things, they draw a parallel to the fight that many of the boys have with the conservative authority that dominates their life at Walton. Their hunger to break free from this authority becomes a battle in its own right, one that ultimately costs Neil his life and breaks his friends’ hearts.

McAllister: "Show me the heart unfettered by foolish dreams and I'll show you a happy man." John Keating: "But only in their dreams can men be truly free. 'Twas always thus, and always thus will be." McAllister: Tennyson? John Keating: No, Keating. McAllister and Keating

Keating is undoubtedly different from his fellow teachers in many ways, and this exchange between him and Mr. McAllister illustrates an example of how. While McAllister feels that the Welton boys need structure set out for them, whereas dreams may “fetter” their hearts, Keating argues that they should use their dreams to be free, and does so with an original quote, whereas McAllister’s was borrowed from Lord Alfred Tennyson. Not only does the content of his response demonstrate his alternate views of how the boys should be educated, but the nature of the quote itself does as well.

For the first time in my whole life, I know what I wanna do! And for the first time, I'm gonna do it! Whether my father wants me to or not! Carpe diem! Neil Perry

Neil’s enthusiasm at the prospect of becoming an actor demonstrates both the passion brimming within him and the influence of Mr. Keating to bring it to the surface. This is especially true with his exclamation of “Carpe Diem,” a direct reference to Keating’s teachings. The tragic irony here, of course, is that Neil is ultimately unable to do what he wants as a result of his father’s strict hold over him.

I'm exercising the right not to walk. Charlie Dalton

Ever the rebel, Charlie demonstrates at many points throughout the film how quick he is to get on board with Mr. Keating’s unorthodox teaching methods. Even before the two meet, Charlie establishes himself as the slacker when the boys discuss their academic prowess in Neil and Todd’s room on move-in day. The above quote is not only consistent with his slacker character, but also demonstrates his understanding of Keating’s lesson in choosing to have his own style of walking be one of stillness.

Now we all have a great need for acceptance, but you must trust that your beliefs are unique, your own, even though others may think them odd or unpopular, even though the herd may go, 'that's baaaaad.' John Keating

This quote nicely sums up what Keating hopes for the boys: that they’ll become individual free thinkers. It’s the lesson that he believes in perhaps most strongly, but also the most dangerous one in the long run, as it’s the one that causes the most friction with Welton’s strict adherence to uniformity and tradition.

Neil Perry: So what are you going to do? Charlie? Charlie Dalton: Dammit, Neil, the name is Nuwanda. Neil Perry and Charlie Dalton

Charlie’s interrogation by Headmaster Nolan is a crucial turning point in the film because it’s the first time the boys’ newfound hunger to be free thinkers and poets rubs up against the administration’s strict ideologies about conformity and tradition. Here, when Charlie corrects Neil, he indicates that not even a beating from the headmaster could change the fact that he 1. is loyal to his fellow poets, and 2. wishes to keep the name that the Society inspired him to don. It’s a testament to the unity and passion that the group inspires in him.

There's a time for daring and there's a time for caution, and a wise man understands which is called for. John Keating

Keating’s talk with Charlie and the other boys after the telephone stunt in the sanctuary demonstrates where he draws the line between teacher and preacher. While he establishes himself as an unorthodox faculty member, he is still an authority figure in the boys' lives and wants them to see their education through to graduation, not get expelled following his teachings. Emphasizing this shows that he considers himself their teacher first, before anything else.

John Keating: I always thought the idea of education was to learn to think for yourself. Mr. Nolan: At these boys' age? Not on your life! John Keating and Headmaster Nolan

This exchange between Nolan and Keating is one of several instances where Keating’s unusual methods begin to get him in hot water. Nolan personifies everything Welton stands for: tradition, discipline, and rules that stand the test of time. Keating, on the other hand, while respecting these beliefs, thinks differently, and it’s this alternative thinking that seems to create such conflict between himself and his peers as well as the boys and the administration.

Dead Poets Society Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Dead Poets Society is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

What’s the theme of dead poets society rip it out

Do you mean the scene where Keeting asks his class to rip out the Pritchard text? He wants them to avoid conformity by ripping a text that treats poetry like a math equation.

Explore Keating's influence on his students and how his encouragement of originality and "carpe diem" affect them.

I can't write your essay for you but can make a general comment. One of Keating’s main, overarching lessons for the boys is the idea of “seizing the day”—that is, making the most of the time they have now and taking advantage of the opportunities...

According to Pitts, all of the girls go for “jerks”. Do you agree with his assessment? Why or why not?

Well, this is a pretty subjective answer from personal experience. Many many years ago I was captain of the chess team in high school. Lets just say girls were not clamouring to wear my jacket. The hockey players,they used to throw pucks at our...

Study Guide for Dead Poets Society

Dead Poets Society study guide contains a biography of director Peter Weir, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Dead Poets Society
• Dead Poets Society Summary
• Character List
• Director's Influence

Essays for Dead Poets Society

Dead Poets Society literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of the film Dead Poets Society directed by Peter Weir.

• Authority Against Individualism: Dead Poets Society and The Rabbits
• Dead Poets Society: The Powerful Thought of Individuality
• Identity in Dead Poets Society and Frost's Poetry
• Exploring Transitions: Educating Rita and Dead Poets Society

Wikipedia Entries for Dead Poets Society

• Introduction

Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Dead Poets Society — Review Of The Film Dead Poet Society

Dead Poets Society: Film Review and Analysis

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Published: Oct 2, 2020

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