You have probably seen this movie, but it is a good one for an aspiring poet--at least from my point of view. Here is my comment after just watching it for the second time in a decade:
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DEAFENING SILENCE & LOUD NOISE
In my last decade as a full-time professional teacher, the film Dead Poets Society was released(1989). I saw the film some time in the 1990s just before retiring. I saw it again tonight on a DVD my son brought on one of his weekend visits. The film was set in 1959 the year I joined the BahaÂ’i Faith. I wonÂ’t summarize the story-line here, but I will contextualize it in terms of my own life and of societyÂ’s in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
There is a strong emphasis in the film on the poet, the individual, finding his own voice, his freedom, his liberation from tradition; a philosophy of thinking for one’s self, a giving-in to impulse, to feeling is at the centre of this film. In 1959 the notion of self-realization was not yet the pop-psych cliché it became in the ‘60s and sheer impulse had yet to become the bi-word of the freewheeling rock-‘n’-roll sixties. Walt Whitman, the supreme poet of personality, is the only poet quoted at length in the film.-Ron Price with thanks to Pamela A. Rooks, “Woo who? Exclusion of otherness in Dead Poets Society,” Australian Journal of Communication, Vol.18, No.2, 1991, pp.75-83.
Still, Peter, I liked your film.1
I did not even know about the
Ivy League schools back then,
but school was about doing what
you were told to do and keeping
your passions well-hidden with
sport and studying.....and a new
religion which came onto the block
back then in those quiet ‘50s and
insensibly moved to the centre of
my life long after sport had moved
to the periphery and it stayed with
me long after girls became marriage
and I had to knuckle-down to routine,
paying bills, mortgages, faithfulness
and what some called the harder virtues.
I needed to find my voice, Peter, no doubt
about it--our whole generation did--as those
prevailing systems and human values were
rapidly breaking down; my world was loosing
its moral moorings, ethical reference points
swept away with passionate intensities filling
the emotions of those who knew so little
and convictions deserting the minds and
hearts of the best: result--deafening silence
and loud noises and rhythms everywhere.
1 Peter Weir, the director
Ron Price
28 July 2007
