The Marrow Of Life: Transcendentalism in the Dead Poets Society

Tom Schulman’s Dead Poets Society serves as a fictitious but accurate account of the Transcendentalist experiment in which a group of boys—led and encouraged by their English teacher Mr. Keating—liberate themselves from the order and tradition of Welton Academy in order to discover their own selves and wills. These teachings of free thought, individualism, and nonconformity, replete with platitudinous or otherwise vague and meaningless language, become the main impetus for the students’ eventual subversion of legitimate authority and devolution into chaos, errors which can be seen as the irreducible cause of their sorrows and which make the screenplay ultimately portray the futility of the Transcendentalist cause and the horrors its misapplications can manifest.

In order to establish free thought as one of the principal characteristics of his class, Mr. Keating begins the semester by having each student tear from his textbook the introduction, determining the analysis of a Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D, on the assessment of poetic value to be absolute “excrement.” After declaring that the students shall once again think for themselves—as if they had ever done so in the first place—the class concludes. He later continues to tell his students that their opinions and perspectives matter and are equal to those of others. His words, in some way or another, affect each of the students over the subsequent weeks; and they, as a consequence, begin to forgo the rules of others for their own. The students, specifically Neil Perry and his study group, begin the Transcendentalist experiment by reconvening the intellectual, albeit illicit, Dead Poets Society, where they read and appreciate the poetic devotions of over five centuries. However, ...

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...arrogance and foolishness within the screenplay, the hubris by which all men fall and by which he is expelled from Welton.

Transcendentalism, when properly viewed and applied, can give one a fulfilling life of introspection, individuality, and progress. However, when such a philosophy is introduced to young and undeveloped minds, these admirable principles become corrupt and raise within the self vices and within the mind errors of the most abominable degree. Dead Poets Society’s Mr. Keating intended for his students to find liberation and truth; but they misused his teachings, leading themselves to suicide, arrogance, and intellectual bankruptcy. Ultimately, because of these consequences, the screenplay portrays Transcendentalism as a negative force with which educators and parents must reckon if the safety of the youth is ever to be maintained and ensured.