I kind of like -
"Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Marxists suck."

There once was a boy from Nantucket...

I'm a fan of the barbaric yawp, myself.

Oh Captain, my Captain!

Another Country-from
Beyond This Dark House
Guy Gavriel Kay

All the leaves that are going to fall
have fallen. Midwinter snows
cover us. At night the cold
is intransigent and absolute.

We dream, in beds too far apart
for the assuaging of desire.

My dream is of the world as whole,
made so by you, spaces closed,
like my eyes, by your hands.

We will make love, sleep
in each other's arms,
wake, live, sleep
at the heart of things.

The small gestures we have made
foretell the ones we will bestow.
I give you what is in me
to offer, you give me everything.

Joe Maurone is one of the more poetical Objectivists.
http://objectivish.blogspot.com/

Another is Robert Malcom:
http://www.visioneerwindows.blogspot.com...

I appreciate the humor, perhaps, that we Objectivists kill passion with reason, but that is the whine of the "humanist" against science. The greatest scientists were all artists of one kind of another. The reflexive is not true of the great artists.

That being as it may, any attempt to concretize John Keating's passions as strictures for living is to miss the point entirely. The movie had nothing to do with children, and everything to with the adult audience.

Motivated by a discussion on the "Rebirth of Reason" board about this movie,(read here http://rebirthofreason.com/Forum/Article...) I got it from the library and watched it again after at least 10 years. It held up despite Objectivish criticism cited on that board. Forgive me for not sharing my own verse here and now. I have published two poems, both ditties, in a computer magazine. Instead I give you these:

We are the music-makers,
And we are the dreamers of dreams,
Wandering by lone sea-breakers,
And sitting by desolate streams.
World-losers and world-forsakers,
Upon whom the pale moon gleams;
Yet we are the movers and shakers,
Of the world forever, it seems.

With wonderful deathless ditties
We build up the world's great cities,
And out of a fabulous story
We fashion an empire's glory:
One man with a dream, at pleasure,
Shall go forth and conquer a crown;
And three with a new song's measure
Can trample an empire down.

We, in the ages lying
In the buried past of the earth,
Built Nineveh with our sighing,
And Babel itself with our mirth;
And o'erthrew them with prophesying
To the old of the new world's worth;
For each age is a dream that is dying,
Or one that is coming to birth.
-------------------------------------------------

I was in a computer lab at our community college a century ago, when I said, "We are the movers and shakers." And one of the lab aides said, "Swinburne?" and the really smartest girl with the great figure said, "O'Shaughnessy. It would have to be an Irishman."

Over on RoR, I offered this:
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.