Dead Poets Society

Last night I watched the movie "The Dead Poets Society" for the first time. Amazing. It is a very powerful movie. It didn't carry a message that was super clear, that anyone who just happened to watch the movie could see. The message required you to discover what it was, and you can only do that if you tap into the poet inside you. It's there, you just have to find it.

One of the messages in the movie is the fact that almost all men and boys have poets inside them. It's just that the poet usually gets pushed away. But he is there. Men make themselves into something other than what they should be. They should be poets, lovers, dreamers and romantics. They should look beyond their physical selves and appreciate the creative genius inside themselves. Inside each teenage boy, fueled by passion and every other emotion it's possible to have, lurks a maker of worlds, a charmer of women, a painter of beautiful paintings. Someone who dreams, and carries those dreams into the "real" world. Inside the boy who runs by himself on the football field; he has one of the most influential novels ever written, a bible of emotional rather than spiritual revelations. The middle aged man who works hard every day to support his family; he holds poems inside that could bring he and his wife back to the days when they were young and courted by the schoolyard wall. Why does this happen? This wasting of talent for the sake of "being a man." Wouldn't a real man be tapping into the revelations inside him? Or would he blindly turn away from that to a dumb, silent reactionary world? Why? Why do they sacrifice their poets for the chance to be a crude brute?