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How is writing related to a world-view? Is poetry for all? Would we lose ourselves without poetry? Is schooling against nature and awareness? What kind of thinking impedes convention?
Tom Schulman: Dead Poets Society
Excerpts from the script of Peter Weir's movie, Dead Poets Society
Page 5
KEATING (awestruck tone) "That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse." Incredible. (pause) Poetry is rapture, lads. Without it we are doomed.
Keating waits a long moment.
KEATING What will your verse be?
CLOSE ON the faces of NEIL, KNOX, CHARLIE, MEEKS, CHAMERON, PITTS, and TODD as they contemplate this question. Softly, Keating breaks the mood:
KEATING Let's open our textbooks to page sixty and learn about Wordsworth notion of romanticism...
[...] KEATING So avoid using the word 'very' because it's lazy. A man is not very tired, he is exhausted. Don't use very sad, use morose. Language was invented for one reason, boys--to woo women--and, in that endeavor, laziness will not do. It also won't do in your essays.The class laughs appreciatively. Keating closes his book, then walks over and raises a map that covers the blackboard in the front of the room. On the board is a quote, which Keating reads aloud:
KEATING Creeds and schools in abeyance I permit to speak at every hazard, Nature without check, with original energy. -- Walt Whitman. Ah, but the difficulty of ignoring those creeds and schools, conditioned as we are by our parents, our traditions, by the modern age. How do we, like Whitman, permit our own true natures to speak? How do we strip ourselves of prejudices, habits, influences? The answer, my dear lads, is that we must constantly endeavor to find a new point of view.
Cf. Wordsworth's Lines & Strange fits of passion - Cf. Rilke, Letter to a Young Poet | Plato, Whom are we talking to? | Kierkegaard, My work as an author | Emerson, Self-knowledge | Gibson - McRury, Discovering one's face | Emerson, We differ in art, not in wisdom | Joyce, Portrait of the Artist
