Nat’l Poetry Month: Living Life with a Barbaric Yawp

One of yesterday’s National Poetry Month posts wasn’t about a book or a poet, per se, but about a movie: Dead Poets Society. We continue with a little more on that topic today…

In this magnificent film, Professor Keating (Robin Williams) dares his students to call him “O Captain! My Captain!” That title is the name of a poem by Walt Whitman. He wrote it about the death of President Abraham Lincoln. See the full poem here. Once you know the ending to Dead Poets Society, this poem’s verses take on a different significance. For those who are familiar with Uncle Walt, his typical long lines of poetry are abandoned in this poem for meter and rhyme.

In a pivotal scene in this film, Keating introduces his impressionable room of young men to this line from Whitman’s Leaves of Grass:

I sound my barbaric yawp over the roof of the world.

A “yawp” is a loud cry or bark. And it becomes a cornerstone of this movie, just like carpe diem.

Keating forces the incredibly shy Todd (Ethan Hawke) to stand before his class and describe Whitman… a turning point for the characters involved, the film, and for anyone viewer who can at all relate to feeling awkward, dumb, or out of their element at any point in their lifetime (particularly during the teenage years).

Here’s the full scene; it’s poetry in the making: