To be completed on looseleaf or typed in COMPLETE SENTENCES. I will collect the sheets on MONDAY. They are to NOT be FOLDED or MESSY or WITHOUT NAMES. Be proud of your work, my little sparrows! Be proud!
1. What was the Dead Poets Society? What did they do? WHY did they have a society?
2. What is the symbolism in the scene where the boys go to the cave?
3. How does Mr. Keating get the boys to look at life differently? What are some of the lessons he teaches them?
4. What does T.S. Eliot mean by the following quote?
"No poet, no artist of any art, has complete meaning alone. His significance, his
appreciation, is the appreciation of his relation to the dead poets and artists. You cannot
value him alone; you must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead."
- T. S. Eliot, from "Tradition and the Individual Talent"
5. Do you think of poetry differently now? Explain.
6. What do you think of Neil’s suicide? Why did he do it? How did it affect his friends?
7. Write a haiku about Mr Keating.
8. Summarize, in your own words, why Henry David Thoreau went to the woods:
"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what is not life, living is so dear; did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God..."
- Henry David Thoreau, from -Walden
