In the film Dead Poets Society, Robin Williams acts as an English professor teaching in a private school with rigorous academic standards and an apathetic student body that has no interest in the words of dead poets and authors. A pivotal scene in the movie is when John Keating (Williams’s character) recites poetry and explains the beauty of literature and art in life. He ends the scene in total silence when he reads the poem O Me! O Life! from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.
“O Me! O Life! Of the questions of these recurring.
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of cities fill’d with the foolish.
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.”
This is extremely important to the scene because Williams mentions that the human race is filled with passion, and poetry, beauty, romance and love are what we stay alive for.
The last line of the poem, to me, speaks as the line that ties everything together for the scene. When Williams explains to his students that the human race lives for passion and beauty, Whitman’s words become even more relevant: life exists–with beauty and exuberance that humans fill it with. Identity exists with the beauty and love and passion we create, and it makes life full and colorful.
At the end of reciting Whitman’s poem, Williams asks his class: “What will your verse be?” To me, that is a perfect way to describe the human condition and utilize Whitman’s insight into the human race–that it requires and produces the beauty of unique identity to survive. That “identity” and that “powerful play” of life is what is essential to not only understanding Whitman’s poem, but also the film itself.