"Dead Poet's Society" and Transcendentalism

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Many people say that you should "go with the flow". In my opinion that gets you nowhere in life. There is value in being a transcendentalist. You learn how to learn and grow independently, so you don't always have to rely on others to guide you to where you want to be. There are a lot of transcendentalists everywhere. There are movies and poems about transcendentalism. There is value in the transcendentalist life style. The movie "Dead Poet's Society" is a great example of a valuable transcendentalist life style. In “Dead Poet’s Society” Mr. Keating taught his English class the phrase "carpe diem", meaning seize the day. He told his class that in order to go far in life they need to take a risk, a leap of faith. He helped one of his students gain the courage to talk to the girl he liked. His name was Knox Overstreet. The girl he liked had a boyfriend, but he didn't let that stop him from trying to win her over. With the advice of his English teacher he not only talked to her but he won her over. Transcendentalists don't believe in following the crowd, they believe in doing what you truly believe is the right thing to do. Even famous poets such as Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson both live transcendentalist lifestyles. They write about it in most of their poems such as Thoreau's Walden and Emerson's Self-Reliance. Thoreau wrote, "if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." This quote means that the people who follow their dreams, or really anything in life, with confidence and with belief in their own strengths, they will be the people who succeed in the long run. He says that you do need to believe yourself to get to where you want to be. Transcendentalists do not believe in government and laws. In Emerson's "Self-Reliance" he

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