Great Lines: Walt Whitman
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The classic film Dead Poets Society (1989), written by Tom Schulman and starring the late, great Robin Williams, is a cinematic tribute to the power of poetry, and to the vital profession of English teaching as it brings language to life for students, helping them grasp the value and force words can have in the world.
Of course many of the ‘great lines’ in the film are not Tom Schulman’s, but those of great poets of English, which Schulman curates into the most poignant moments of John Keating’s teaching. Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass—a collection first published at the height of American Romanticism in 1855, and reworked by Whitman during the late 19th century American Renaissance—is given special prominence in Keating’s unconventional and inspiring lessons. In one scene, the boys are taken to a field and given lines from ‘A Song of Joys’, which they have to read with feeling before kicking a ball, fueled by the energy of the words.
In a soulful classroom moment, Keating brings the boys into a huddle to explain how ‘words and language […] words and ideas can change the world.’ He uses Whitman’s ‘O Me! O Life!’ to illustrate his point; in the poem, the speaker laments, in the Romantic vein, the seeming corruption and emptiness of industrial, modern life, asking ‘what good’ can exist within it. In Shakespearean defiance against his own despair, the speaker gives a heartening ‘answer’—that there is inherent meaning in existence and selfhood, and in the opportunity to lend one’s voice to the ‘powerful play’ of life. It’s a celebration of human being and potential.
O Me! O Life!
By Walt Whitman
O me! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I, and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the struggle ever renew’d,
Of the poor results of all, of the plodding and sordid crowds I see around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring—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.
Walt Whitman, 1819–1892.