dead poet society essay

Dead Poets Society

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

The novel is set in 1959 at the prestigious Welton Academy, a Vermont boarding school. As the school year begins, we meet Todd Anderson , a shy new student who’s transferred from another school, as well as Neil Perry , Richard Cameron , and Charlie Dalton —all junior-year students. Neil Perry is a likable, kind student, and is Todd’s roommate; Neil is terrified of his own father, Mr. Perry , who insists that Neil must study chemistry, go to Harvard, and become a doctor. Richard Cameron is an uptight, conforming student who hates breaking rules; Charlie Dalton, on the other hand, is an easygoing, rebellious student who loves breaking rules.

Another Welton student and friend of Neil’s, Knox Overstreet , goes to have dinner with some family friends, the Danburrys. During dinner, he meets Chris Noel , the beautiful girlfriend of Chet Danburry , the Danburrys’ son. Knox is instantly smitten, but doesn’t know what to do about his love.

Classes begin at Welton. Most of the teachers are extremely rigorous and controlling. However, there’s a new English teacher at school, John Keating , who is different. Keating immediately impresses his students with his charismatic, energetic lectures—in the first of which he stands on his desk . While other teachers force students to do homework and obey them at all times, Keating begins the year by talking about “Carpe Diem,” the idea that humans should “seize the day”—i.e., make the most of life while they’re alive. This year, Keating promises, he wants to teach his students how to be extraordinary instead of simply following the rules. Keating’s unusual teaching methods draw some attention from his colleagues, but because he’s an intelligent, likable man, he stays in the good graces of the Welton headmaster, Gale Nolan .

Neil tries to engage with Todd and become his friend, but Todd is too shy and reserved. Things begin to change when Neil comes across an old yearbook in which he learns that John Keating was once a student at Welton; during that time, Keating was a member of a club called the Dead Poets Society. When Neil and his friends ask Keating about the Dead Poets, Keating explains that the Dead Poets met in a cave near Welton, read poetry, and celebrated life. Later, Neil finds that someone, presumably Keating, has put an old poetry anthology marked “Dead Poets” in his room. Neil convinces his friends, including Knox, Cameron, Charlie, and Todd, to go to the cave, and together they read from the poetry anthology, gradually becoming transfixed by the poems’ beauty.

In class, Keating asks his students to compose poems. Todd is at first unable to write anything that he feels comfortable reading in from of the other students, but with Keating’s encouragement, he improvises a brilliant poem about Keating’s hero, Walt Whitman. Afterwards, Todd begins to open up, both with his classmates and with Keating. He admits to Neil that he feels that his parents don’t love him—they’re incredibly hard on him, and clearly prefer his older sibling. Neil is sympathetic to Todd’s problems, since they echo his own. Keating’s lessons also inspire Neil to try out for a local production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream –to his delight, he gets the lead part of Puck.

The students’ attempts to “seize the day,” inspired by Keating, become increasingly reckless and foolish. Charlie Dalton pens an article in the school paper in which he claims that women should be admitted to Welton, and signs it “The Dead Poets.” To protect his classmates, Charlie comes forward and admits he wrote the article—he’s given corporal punishment by Nolan, but doesn’t tell Nolan anything about the Dead Poets Society. Meanwhile, Knox is invited to a party with Chris and Chet—at the party, he gets very drunk and, telling himself that he’s just “seizing the day,” he touches Chris’s breasts, infuriating Chet. In response to his students’ wild actions, and the suspicion he’s been getting from Nolan, Keating tries to teach his students how to be realistic, “survive” college, and bluff their ways through essays about horrible books that aren’t worth reading.

Mr. Perry finds out that Neil is going to be in A Midsummer Night’s Dream , and furiously forbids him from performing in the play. Neil, unsure what to do, goes to Keating for advice. Keating advises Neil to talk to his father and show him how passionate he is about acting. Neil can’t bring himself to talk to his father, but tells Keating that Mr. Perry gave him permission to perform after all.

Knox goes to Chris’s school and reads her a poem he wrote for her, in which he professes his love. Later, Chris visits Knox at Welton and warns him that Chet is going to kill him for what he’s done. Knox begs Chris to go see A Midsummer Night’s Dream with him—if she doesn’t have a good time, he’ll never try to see her again. Reluctantly, Chris agrees.

Chris, Knox, Keating, and the other Dead Poets go to see Neil in A Midsummer Night’s Dream . Neil is spectacular as Puck, to everyone’s delight, especially Todd. Chris begins to develop feelings for Knox during the performance—and later that night, she kisses Knox. After the show, however, Mr. Perry appears to confront Neil. He brings Neil home and tells him that he’ll be going to a rigorous military academy from now on—clearly, Welton is distracting him from his “goals” of being a doctor. Neil is so upset by this news that, late at night, he shoots himself with his father’s revolver.

In the aftermath of Neil’s suicide, there’s an investigation, at Mr. Perry’s request, into the matter. Cameron betrays the Dead Poets by going to Nolan and telling him about the Dead Poets Society. Nolan uses Cameron’s information to cast Keating as a scapegoat—by blaming Keating for “corrupting” Neil with talk of freedom and individuality, Nolan hopes to avoid a full-scale scandal with Welton’s wealthy alumni donors.

One by one, the students are brought into Nolan’s office and forced to sign a document stating that Keating corrupted them with his free-thinking lessons, and thereby compelled Neil to commit suicide. While most of the Dead Poets sign the document, Todd refuses to do so—and Nolan places him under strict probation for refusing to go along. In spite of Todd’s loyalty, Keating is fired from Welton and essentially barred from ever teaching again.

In the final chapter, the students file into English class, now being taught by the dull Headmaster Nolan himself. In the middle of the lesson, Keating walks in to pick up his personal items. While Keating gathers his things, Todd runs up to him, explaining that Nolan forced the students to sign the document that’s gotten Keating fired. Keating smiles and nods, showing that he understands. Todd stands on his desk, just as Keating did during his first lesson at Welton. Slowly, and despite Nolan’s cries to stop, the other students join Todd in an inspiring show of solidarity with Keating.

Dead Poets Society

53 pages • 1 hour read

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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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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.

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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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — Dead Poets Society — The Main Messages In The Film Dead Poets Society

The Main Messages in The Film Dead Poets Society

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Dead Poets Society

By peter weir, dead poets society the poetry of dead poets society.

Dead Poets Society features a myriad of famous poets and their works. As one example, John Keating tells the more daring among his students that they may refer to him as "O Captain! My Captain!" a reference to Walt Whitman's poem of the same title. Born in 1819, Walt Whitman considered the American Civil War one of the central events of his life. A staunch Unionist throughout the conflict, he grew to love President Abraham Lincoln after an initially indifferent opinion of him. He wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" about Lincoln following his assassination. The poem, one of the most well-known classic poems of today, is classified as an elegy to the late president. That the students use it to refer to Mr. Keating , particularly in the iconic final scene of the film in which they proclaim it as they stand on their desks, draws a direct parallel between Lincoln and Keating as revered men gone too soon—in Lincoln's case, referring to his death, and in Keating's, to his being fired.

The boys invoke a famous quote by Henry David Thoreau at the beginning of each meeting of the Dead Poets Society: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life..." The quote is taken from Thoreau's book Walden , which he wrote about spending more than two years on his own in a small cabin by Walden Pond in Concord, Massachusetts. The book focuses on living simply and with purpose, and has been called everything from a social experiment to satire to a manual for self-reliance. No doubt, the cited quote mirrors what the boys themselves do through the Dead Poets Society: going to the woods to recite poetry to one another, and eventually to express themselves in many ways, including storytelling, dancing, and playing the saxophone. Many of the boys feel that the academic shackles that hold them are unjust, and some, especially Neil, fear that when it's their time to die and begin "fertilizing daffodils," as Mr. Keating glibly put it, that they will "discover that [they] had not lived." The quote is therefore an effective and appropriate one to use to begin each of the Society's meetings.

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