—

O Robin! My Captain!

Your children have been out of school and underfoot
for less than a month and already you are counting the
days—minutes, you say?—until school regathers them
to its bosom in blessed September. For now, enroll then
for two hours in Welton Academy. You, too, might as
well matriculate for the pleasure of studying poetry
with John Keating.

Keating, played with restrained perfection by Robin
Williams (there is no “Goooooo000000d Morning
Vermont!”), is the intense but deft English teacher
whose spirit drives “Dead Poets Society.” This movie
may wean a few adolescents away from addiction to the
merely visual. It can spark appreciation of the rap-
tures—that is not too strong a word—they can receive

m words.

The title itself speaks well of the movie’s makers.
Notice, no roman numeral. In this summer of sequels
(coming soon, “Ghostbusters Go Star Trekking Through
a Nightmare on Elm Street with Indiana Jones, Part
XIV") this is an original idea. The title is quirky and
probably off-putting to the lowing bovine herd of
people who are put off by anything odd. Poets? Today,
slam-bang mindless action seems required to arrest the
attention of the jaded public with its flickering five-
second attention span. This movie promises only—
only!—the pleasure of words.

A prep-school teacher as hero? Keating is heroic, but
not in the banal manner of the whip-cracking, death-
defying archaeologist Jones. Keating’s heroism is in his
discipline, the purity of his devotion to his vocation. It
is, for him, literally a vocatio, a calling. Language
spoken by dead poets calls him. He will summon from
some sons of the upper class a sense of the wonderful
wildness of life.

Wildness is severely suppressed at staid Welton in
rural Vermont in 1959. But Keating enkindles seven
students who revive a secret society, the Dead Poets. It
meets after midnight, against school rules, in a cave,
where poetry is read after an invocation by Thoreau: “I

e.” When they prance through the forest fog toward
the cave they resemble druids in duffel coats. Youth
usually has its private language. The seven boys

anted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of
¢

INSIDE DOUGLAS COLLEGE / DECEMBER 19, 1989
VOLUME XI, NUMBER 24

 

INNOVATION ABSTRACTS

Mite sltaiia\ Wel ian iirdses trae Wicker W raien lars stos =) Mei tts SIRAO ao LC USI
WITH SUPPORT FROM THE W. K KELLOGG FOUNDATION ANDTHE SID W. RICHARDSON FOUNDATION

experience from poetry a bonding and delight that
today’s youth derive from rock music and the pathetic
verbal slouching of rap.
Robin Williams's favorite poet is e.e. cummings. That
figures. Or: tHa)t fi!Gu s. cummings, whose exuber-
e

r
ance was too protean for orthodox typography, said

the Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds.
Williams's Keating begins refurbishing his pupils’ souls
by telling them they are mortal, “food for worms,
lads!...Carpe Diem, lads.” The boys declaim lines from
Whitman while kicking soccer balls. Keating’s credo is
Whitman’s, “...the powerful play goes on and you may
contribute a verse.”

A powerful teacher like Keating may at times teeter
on the brink of intellectual bullying, making individual-
ity mandatory. However, Williams rightly describes
Keating as a “catalyst” for the boys, and Keating
periodically recedes from the story. This is the movie's
point. Keating is always there because a good teacher is
a benevolent contagion, an infectious spirit, an emulable
stance toward life. That is why it is said good teachers
enjoy a kind of immortality: their influence never stops
radiating.

The school (actually, St. Andrew’s in Delaware) has
an N. C. Wyeth mural. On one side, boys surround a
figure of Liberty; on the other, industrialists surround a
drafting table. The mural serenely suggests the easy
compatibility of liberty and practicality, the free man as
pragmatist. The movie sees a shadow over life, a
tension between the poetic and practical impulses. Both
are natural and dignified. What is perennially problem-
atic is accommodating individuality and social ambi-
tion.

Adolescent awakening: The story is set on the eve of
the 1960s, so it may seem quaint that Keating must toil
to overcome student passivity. Actually, few ‘60s
students fit the ‘60s stereotypes. Furthermore, this story
of adolescent awakening is both of the late 50s time,
and timeless. Although the 1950s are called years of
‘conformity,’ the principal conformity was that of the
chorus decrying it. The characterization of the Eisen-
hower years as “the bland leading the bland” does no
justice to the intellectual ferment and literary vigor.

 

 

EDB 348, Austin, Texas 78712

THE NATIONAL INSTITUTE FOR STAFF AND ORGANIZATIONAL DEVELOPMENT (NISOD)
Community College Leadership Program, The University of Texas at Austin

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