Gema Intertekstual Puisi Romantis dalam Dead Poets Society Karya N.H. Kleinbaum = Intertextual Echoes of Romantic Poetry in N.H. Kleinbaum's Dead Poets Society

Yuliyati Purnamasari. Intertextual Echoes of Romantic Poetry in N.H. Kleinbaum’s Dead Poets Society (Supervised by Prof. Dra. Herawaty, M.Hum., M.A., Ph.D., and Rezky Ramadhani, S.S., M.Litt.). This study explores the intertextual relations between selected Romantic era and contemporary poems, Robert Herrick’s To The Virgins, To Make Much of Time (1684), Robert Frost’s The Road Not Taken (1916), Walt Whitman’s O Me! O Life! (1867) and the prose narrative of N.H. Kleinbaum’s Dead Poets Society (1989). It mainly seeks to examine how intertextual references determine the meanings of the selected poems, as well as how the novel makes sense of their old conceptual frameworks around oppression by embedding them in a totalitarian institutional setting. This research adopts a qualitative descriptive-analytical method grounded in Julia Kristeva’s theory of intertextuality and textual transformation, examining the novel not as text but as a palimpsestic patchwork of quotations that absorb and reframes previous literary discourses. The finding demonstrates that the poetic insertions operate as ideological engine instead of just superficial style points, acting as a spur for spiritual awakening and rebellion against the established pedagogical paradigm of Welton Academy’s stifling Dixonian-like nihilistic mechanistic bent. By consciously exploiting figurative language, the poems undergo drastic thematic shifts in their original contexts: Herrick’s carpe diem turns pastoral courtship to an urgent command for agency; Frost’s structural irony about human choice morphs into a categorical imperative against conformity; and Whitman’s individual existential musings become a collective vehicle to institutional subversion in nature as an ungoverned space. Ultimately, this study reveals that modern poetry functions as a literary palimpsest, echoing and revising achievements of earlier poets to probe contemporary models of autonomy.