Dead Poet's Society and American Romanticism

This is obviously not an attitude shared by John Keating, although the English teacher's stance does not stem so much from the 18th century Enlightenment that Burke attacks, as from the Romanticism of the New England Transcendentalists. It is, as Keating points out, more than coincidence that he focuses extensively on the Romantics, and the portrait of Walt Whitman adorns his classroom for a reason. That Thoreau's words open all the meetings of the Dead Poets Society also testifies to the Romantic principles of the English teacher. Emerson is not explicitly mentioned in the story, but the presence of his Transcendentalist thought is evident in almost everything Keating says. Emerson's essay "The American Scholar," for example, or his "Self-Reliance," can be as much perceived as the background of Keating's pronouncements as Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution as that of Mr. Nolan's. This becomes clear by observing how Keating deals with the "four pillars" of Welton pedagogy.

Like Emerson, Keating is not just untraditional, but an anti-traditionalist: "Try never to think about anything the same way twice!" he tells his students. "If you're sure about something, force yourself to think about it another way." Adhering to established way too often leads to being stuck in ruts, according to his teaching, and thus to the weakening of the intensity of life as well as the power of the mind. Knox, as an enthusiastic follower of Keating, is once asked by a teacher: "What is wrong with old habits, Mr. Overstreet?" "They perpetuate mechanical living, Sir. They limit your mind," the student replies, greatly enjoying his magisterial performance. (This latter exchange, although present in Schulman's script, has been left out in the final cut of the movie.)

It is not that such thinking is blind to the virtues or greatness of the past, but it implies that staying with past accomplishments is detrimental. Emerson writes in "The American Scholar": "The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they,--let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead." It is for this reason that Keating places more emphasis on what students think here and now than on what others have thought in the past. The fact that students are actively responding to intellectual impulses is more important than their passive reception of what preceding generations have produced. Learning, according to Keating, has more to do with activating and inspiring the innermost feelings of adolescents than with forcing ready-made and handed-down packages of knowledge on them. Whatever a cultural heritage has to offer, according to Keating, it will remain something alien and sterile unless a certain hunger and enthusiasm has been created in students first. In the formulation of "The American Scholar":

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office,--to teach elements. But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on flame.

It is necessary, as Thoreau suggests, to go to the woods-to connect to the wilderness in one way or another--to get a real hold of one's life. "Life consists with wildness," he writes in his essay "Walking," and "in wildness is the preservation of the world." In the same spirit in which Emerson defined the true self not as reason, but as "intuition" or "instinct," Thoreau declares primal nature as the true source of life, strength, and inspiration, not the artifices of culture and civilization:

From the forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks that brace mankind. ... The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every state which has risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar wild source.

An important sign of a person's integrity, according to "Self-Reliance," is that person's courage to trust his or her own insights and intuitions, rather than those of established authors and acknowledged authorities:

To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men,--that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment. Familiar as the voice of the mind is to each, the highest merit we ascribe to Moses, Plato, and Milton is that they set at naught books and traditions, and spoke not what men, but what they thought... Trust thyself!--every heart vibrates to that iron string.

Works Cited

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Self Reliance and The American Scholar

Thoreau, Henry David. Walden