Wikipedia Deep Dive

Dead Poets Society

12 min read

The Teacher Who Made Poetry Dangerous

In 1989, a movie about boys reading poetry in a cave became one of the highest-grossing films of the year. That sentence alone tells you something remarkable happened.

Dead Poets Society earned nearly $236 million worldwide—against a budget of just $16.4 million—and won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. It beat out action blockbusters and special effects spectacles by telling a quiet story about an English teacher at a boarding school. The film tapped into something primal: the hunger for a teacher who sees you, who lights something on fire inside you, who makes learning feel like rebellion.

Robin Williams plays John Keating, a teacher who returns to his alma mater, the fictional Welton Academy, in 1959. Welton is everything you'd expect from an elite New England prep school—stone buildings, Latin mottos, traditions calcified into ritual. The school's four pillars are Tradition, Honor, Discipline, and Excellence. Keating arrives and immediately starts dismantling the architecture.

Carpe Diem and the Art of Standing on Desks

Keating's first lesson is about death.

He takes his students to the school's trophy cases, where photographs of former students stare out from decades past. "They're not that different from you, are they?" he asks. Same haircuts, same hopes, same sense of invincibility. Now they're fertilizing daffodils. The message lands like a punch: your time is limited, so what are you going to do with it?

This is where the famous phrase enters. Carpe diem—Latin for "seize the day." The American Film Institute would later rank Keating's delivery of "Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys. Make your lives extraordinary" as the 95th greatest movie quote of all time.

Keating's methods are theatrical, almost subversive. He has students stand on his desk to see the world from a different angle. He tells them to rip out the introduction to their poetry textbook—a section that reduces poetry to a mathematical formula for measuring greatness. He leads them into the courtyard and asks them to walk however they want, to discover their own stride rather than conforming to everyone else's pace.

These scenes are why the film resonated so deeply. For anyone who sat through years of rote learning, of being told what to think rather than how to think, Keating represents liberation.

The Cave and the Society

The students discover that Keating himself was once a member of something called the Dead Poets Society during his own student days. The name suggests something both morbid and romantic—a secret club devoted to the words of writers who are no longer alive, whose voices can only be heard through their work.

Neil Perry, one of Keating's students, decides to resurrect the society. He and his friends begin sneaking off campus at night to a cave in the woods, where they read poetry by candlelight. It's an act of defiance dressed as literature. In the conformist world of Welton, simply gathering to read Whitman and Thoreau without supervision becomes revolutionary.

The group includes an interesting cross-section of adolescent archetypes. There's Todd Anderson, painfully shy and terrified of his own voice. Knox Overstreet, hopelessly romantic and pursuing a girl who's dating someone else. Charlie Dalton, the rebellious provocateur who eventually publishes an article in the school newspaper demanding that girls be admitted to Welton—under the Dead Poets Society's name, naturally. And Neil himself, who discovers a passion for acting that puts him on a collision course with his authoritarian father.

The Weight of Parental Expectation

Neil's storyline forms the tragic backbone of the film. His father has mapped out his entire future: Welton, then Harvard, then medical school, then a respectable career as a doctor. There's no room in this blueprint for what Neil actually wants.

When Neil wins the lead role in a local production of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream—playing Puck, the mischievous fairy—he experiences something he's never felt before: joy in his own choices. But his father discovers his involvement and demands he quit immediately.

Keating advises Neil to talk to his father honestly, to explain his passion. It's good advice for most families. But Keating doesn't fully understand the prison Neil inhabits. The conversation never happens the way it needs to. Neil performs in the play—brilliantly—and his father responds by announcing plans to withdraw him from Welton and send him to military school.

That night, Neil takes his father's gun and ends his life.

It's a gut-punch that transforms the film from inspirational drama into something far more complicated. Seizing the day, the film suggests, comes with risks. Not everyone can break free.

The Scapegoat

In the aftermath of Neil's death, the school needs someone to blame. Keating becomes the obvious target.

One of the students, Richard Cameron, betrays the group to save himself. He tells the headmaster about the Dead Poets Society and names Keating as the corrupting influence. The other members are brought in one by one and pressured to sign letters confirming Cameron's accusations. Their parents hover. The threat of expulsion looms. One by one, they sign.

Keating is fired.

But the final scene offers a sliver of redemption. As Keating returns to his classroom to collect his belongings, the headmaster—who has temporarily taken over the class—is droning through a lesson. Todd, the shy boy who could barely speak at the beginning of the film, stands on his desk.

"O Captain! My Captain!" he says—the opening line of a Walt Whitman poem about Abraham Lincoln that Keating had taught them. It's a salute. A farewell. A declaration.

Other students follow. Not all of them. But enough. They stand on their desks in defiance of the headmaster's threats, honoring the teacher who taught them that their voices matter.

The Real Teacher Behind the Fiction

Tom Schulman, who wrote the screenplay and won the Oscar for it, based the story on his own experiences at Montgomery Bell Academy in Nashville, Tennessee. The character of Keating was inspired by his teacher Samuel Pickering, though the real Pickering was never fired and lived a long career as a professor at the University of Connecticut.

The film's journey to the screen was troubled. Jeff Kanew was originally hired as director and envisioned Liam Neeson in the lead role. Other actors considered for Keating included Dustin Hoffman, Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, and Mickey Rourke. But Touchstone Pictures wanted Robin Williams, and when Williams refused to work with Kanew, the studio made a dramatic decision: they burned down the already-constructed sets and fired Kanew.

Peter Weir, the Australian director known for films like Witness and The Year of Living Dangerously, took over. He read Schulman's script on a flight back to Sydney and was captivated. Six weeks later, he was in Los Angeles casting.

Weir made crucial changes. In Schulman's original manuscript, Keating was dying of Hodgkin lymphoma, and there was a deathbed scene in a hospital. Weir cut it entirely. He reasoned that audiences would focus on Keating's illness rather than what he stood for. The teacher's physical fate became ambiguous; what mattered was his legacy in the students he touched.

Disney executives, who oversaw Touchstone, had some suggestions of their own. They proposed making the students' passion dancing rather than poetry. The new title would be Sultans of Swing. They wanted the focus shifted from the boys to Mr. Keating himself.

Weir dismissed all of it.

Filming in Delaware's Past

The production scouted more than seventy universities and private schools before settling on St. Andrew's School in Middletown, Delaware. The Everett Theatre, also in Middletown, served as the venue for Neil's theatrical performance. Additional locations in New Castle and Wilmington rounded out the fictional Vermont setting.

To create the world of 1959, storefronts in Delaware towns were transformed. All modern conveniences were removed. Weir insisted that his young cast avoid modern slang even when the cameras weren't rolling—a technique to keep them immersed in the period.

The classroom scenes with Keating were actually filmed on a soundstage replica in Wilmington. And Weir admitted to hiding half a day's filming from Disney executives to give Williams the freedom to improvise using his comedic skills.

More than three thousand extras appeared in the film through open casting calls. On set, Williams cracked jokes constantly—which Ethan Hawke, playing Todd, found irritating. But Williams also championed Hawke's talent to his own agent, telling him that the young actor would "do really well." He was right. Hawke went on to become one of his generation's most respected actors.

Critical Divide

The film earned strong reviews overall—85% positive on Rotten Tomatoes—but it also attracted sharp criticism from certain quarters.

Roger Ebert, one of America's most influential film critics, gave it only two stars out of four. He criticized Williams for occasionally slipping into his stand-up comedy persona and found the screenplay full of "pious platitudes." He also noted something curious for a film set in the late 1950s: there's no mention of the Beat Generation writers—Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs—who were defining a new literary counterculture at exactly that moment. At a school where poetry is the path to rebellion, you'd expect someone to be passing around a copy of Howl.

Ebert's colleague Gene Siskel agreed with the mixed assessment. Both critics questioned whether Robin Williams deserved his Oscar nomination, suggesting the honor should have gone to Matt Dillon for Drugstore Cowboy or John Cusack for Say Anything.

Pauline Kael, the legendary New Yorker critic, called the film "middlebrow highmindedness" but praised Williams anyway. "Robin Williams' performance is more graceful than anything he's done before," she wrote. "He's totally, concentratedly there."

Perhaps the most pointed critique came years later from Kevin Dettmar in The Atlantic. He argued that the film's portrayal of studying literature is "both misleading and deeply seductive." Keating's teaching method, Dettmar wrote, amounts to "the literary equivalent of fandom"—all emotional response, no analytical rigor. It's anti-intellectual dressed up as inspiration.

This critique has merit. Keating never teaches his students how to read closely, how to understand meter or form, how poetry actually works on a technical level. He teaches them to feel poetry. That's valuable, but it's incomplete.

Still, the film wasn't trying to be a documentary about pedagogy. It was trying to capture the feeling of having a teacher who makes you believe you matter. For millions of viewers, it succeeded.

Legacy and Loss

The American Film Institute ranked Dead Poets Society as the 52nd most inspiring film ever made.

Its real legacy, though, is harder to measure. How many people became teachers because of John Keating? When Robin Williams died by suicide in August 2014, teachers around the world came forward to say exactly that—that his performance had inspired their careers. Fans recreated the "O Captain! My Captain!" scene on social media as tribute.

The parallels between Williams's death and Neil's fate in the film are almost too painful to contemplate. Both men brought joy to others while battling private demons. Both endings felt like unfinished sentences.

The film has continued to ripple through culture. A theatrical adaptation opened off-Broadway in 2016, with Jason Sudeikis in the Keating role. Productions followed in Mexico and Germany. When Taylor Swift released her album The Tortured Poets Department in 2024, the music video for "Fortnight" featured Ethan Hawke and Josh Charles from the original film—a nod to the connection between the two titles.

What the Film Gets Right

For all its flaws, Dead Poets Society understands something essential about education: it's not just information transfer. The best teachers don't simply deposit knowledge into empty vessels. They ignite something. They create conditions where students discover their own voices.

The film also captures the genuine danger of this approach. Keating's methods work beautifully for some students and catastrophically for others. Neil needed practical help navigating his family situation, not just inspiration. Charlie needed guidance on how to be subversive without self-destruction. The film doesn't let Keating off the hook entirely—there's a scene where he gently admonishes Charlie, reminding the boys that actions have consequences.

But perhaps the film's truest insight is about institutional response to unconventional teaching. Welton Academy doesn't fire Keating because he failed. They fire him because he succeeded in ways they couldn't control. He made poetry feel dangerous. He made students question the architecture of their lives. For institutions built on tradition and conformity, that's the unforgivable sin.

Standing on the Desk

The image that endures is those boys standing on their desks.

It's become a kind of shorthand for student rebellion, for honoring mentors, for the moment when fear gives way to something braver. The image has been parodied—most memorably in a Saturday Night Live sketch where Pete Davidson's character is decapitated by a ceiling fan while attempting it—but parody is its own form of tribute.

What makes the scene work is that it's not a victory. Keating still loses his job. The boys still signed those letters under pressure. The institution wins, at least in any practical sense. But in standing, the students declare that what they learned can't be unlearned. The fire Keating lit will keep burning, even without him there to tend it.

That's what the best teaching does. It outlasts the teacher.

Carpe diem. Seize the day. Make your lives extraordinary. It's advice that sounds simple until you try to follow it in a world that rewards conformity. The tension between those words and the reality they bump against—that's what Dead Poets Society is really about.