Robin Williams teaches English at a 1959 Vermont boarding school and tells his students to rip the introduction out of their poetry textbook. The boys revive a secret poetry club in a cave, and the books do most of the character work.
Drop a frame, get a number. The first 100 become Founding Sleuths.
Keating tells the boys they can call him "O Captain! My Captain!" if they're feeling daring, and in the last scene they climb onto their desks to do it. Whitman wrote the poem in 1865 about Lincoln's assassination. Book Riot's live-blog says an early script had Keating dying of leukemia, which would have fit the poem. As shot, he gets fired.
Neil wins the part of Puck over his father's objection, and the play ends on Puck's epilogue with Thomas Perry in the audience. That speech asks the crowd to forgive everything as a dream. Mr. Perry does not.
At the first revived meeting Neil reads from Tennyson's "Ulysses," and the film trims it down to the greatest hits. The speaker is an old king telling his crew to keep sailing instead of retiring, which lands differently in a room of teenagers who need a pass to leave campus.
Thoreau's line about living deep and sucking out all the marrow of life becomes the club's mission statement. He wrote it after two years in a cabin by a pond. The boys upgrade to a cave and a curfew violation.
