Running on poetry: Words on Celluloid

The hero of Dead Poets’ Society is the poetry of Walt Whitman.

The tragic death of Robin Williams brought focus back to his 1989 movie, Dead Poets Society .

Williams plays John Keating, a teacher who inspires his students to love poetry using rather unorthodox methods. The movie contains the work by many poets, such as Tennyson, Shakespeare and Robert Frost.

But it’s the lines of Walt Whitman immortalised in their passionate rendition that has stayed with me. Whitman isn’t new to me. I have read his lines and heard about him from a friend who was passionately devoted to his words. But “Oh Captain! My Captain!” was brought to life in the ardent expressions of the students and the hopeful, delightful and regretful expression of their dedicated teacher, the gifted Robin Williams.

Walt Whitman’s work also features in

The Notebook , the tear-jerker of a retelling of Nicholas Sparks’ bestselling novel. Spontaneous Me is the poem Ryan Gosling is reading out loud when Rachel McAdams pays him a visit with a portrait she’s made of him.

Whitman says, “The real poems, (what we call poems being merely pictures/ The poems of the privacy of the night, and of men like me/ This poem, drooping shy and unseen, that I always carry, and that all men carry ...”

In

Four Weddings and a Funeral , W.H. Auden’s immortal words in

Funeral Blues are narrated by Matthew, on the death of his partner, Gareth. The poem starts with the unforgettable lines, “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone/Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone...” and ends with, “The stars are not wanted now, put out every one. Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun. Pour out the ocean and sweep up the wood/for nothing now can ever come to any good.” John Hannah, who plays Matthew, speaks the lines with such emotion and pain that one is reminded again of the fleetness of time and the fragility of love.

Michelle Pfeiffer uses Bob Dylan to get to Dylan Thomas in Dangerous Minds . ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ paves the way for the interpretation of Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night and Pfeiffer, who plays a teacher in the movie has students who are eager, inspired and more than willing to “...rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

It’s always a good idea to teach in the way a student might understand. What better than a popular tune?

From classroom verse to war, and nothing hits home quite as much as Apocalypse Now . One hears lines from T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men , in the haunting voice of Marlon Brando.

“Between the desire and the spasm/Between the potency and the existence/Between the essence and the descent/ Falls the Shadow.” Listening to Brando, you sense the futility of war and what it means for the ones fighting, on the frontlines.

Movies with poems, about poems and about poets. Poetry about movies - the making, the experience and the stars. Two creative avenues come together and create something rather special, delighting all of us who are admirers of either or both.