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In terms of how Keating reinforces the boys’ privilege, I think it’s also worth considering the texts that he privileges in his class. Dead Poets’ Society takes place in 1959, well into the Beat movement and four years after the publication of Ginsberg’s “Howl,” poetic movements that did much to push the boundaries of what poetry could say and do, to say nothing of the movements that preceded it — Modernism, Surrealism, Dada, Postmodernism, etc. What Keating gives the boys, instead of all of these, are poems by poets who are firmly fixed within the western canon, a rigid literary tradition: Shakespeare, Herrick, Thoreau, Lord Byron, and Tennyson. While encouraging his students to free their minds, Keating gives them the literature prized by the dominant cultural faction that the wealthy, all-white male students of Welton belong to.