Question

How does The Dead Poets Society express romantic ideas?

Answer 1

Answer:

The movie emphasizes strong emotions and passions, honesty, and individualism. It shows how students, led by their unorthodox teacher, start exploring various good and bad sides of life and start living to the fullest. They enjoy their feelings and art, recite poetry, find themselves, and fight the authority. They share this throughout the moves by forming a "dead poets society" and attending English literature classes. All of these explorations of passion, love, art, and grief are expressions of romanticism, and the movie puts a strong accent on the importance of these experiences.

Explanation:

Romantic ideas and romanticism in art do not have to portray simply the expressions of love and romantic relationship between the characters. It is the exploration of creativity, ideas, passions, feelings, and emotions.

In the movie Dead Poets Society we follow professor John Keating and his unique teaching methods during the semester he works with boys of Welton academy. He makes them focus on poetry and emotional literature, to encourage them to seize all the opportunities, enjoy life, and explore their emotional side. Keating states “the human race is filled with passion” and “poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for”. By this, he wants to make students realize the true meaning of life is in exploring these strong feelings and the beauties of the world, which is a very romantic idea and one of the main points of the romanticism movement.

We follow the students through their adventures while they explore life. Neil pursues his passion for acting, seeing there is more to life than what his father wants. Todd starts expressing his emotions for the first time and realizes the beauty of friendship and community. Charlie gets in touch with the rawest feelings of bravery and adventure, exploring them also through sax music. Knox falls in love for the first time and dares to face his feelings. They all form the group that focuses on poetry and friendship, as one form of love, which is the strong romantic ideals.

The movie explores the romantic, passionate, and sensational side of coming of age, meeting the beauties of the world for the first time. This also includes the senses of grief, loss, and failure, as the key parts of life. Yet, even those are shown to hold the beauty and experience for the characters, as they learn a lot through it and become stronger and more united.

All these explorations of feelings (good and bad), passions, and arts are the portrays of true, raw romantic ideas, idealizations of the sensibility of life and enjoyment in all its sides, as long as they are honest and adventurous.