O Captain! My Captain!

Walt Whitman’s poem was first published in The Saturday Press on November 4, 1865. It was considered one of the greatest American poems during the following century. Whitman saw Abraham Lincoln several times between 1861 and 1865, sometimes at close quarters. He considered himself and Lincoln to be ‘afloat in the same stream’ and ‘rooted on the same ground’ The poem still resonates in popular culture, notably in the film Dead Poets Society.

About O Captain! My Captain! in brief

Walt Whitman’s poem was first published in The Saturday Press on November 4, 1865. It was considered one of the greatest American poems during the following century. The poem is considered stylistically uncharacteristic of Whitman’s poetry because of its rhyming, song-like flow, and simple metaphor. Whitman saw Abraham Lincoln several times between 1861 and 1865, sometimes at close quarters. Whitman considered himself and Lincoln to be ‘afloat in the same stream’ and ‘rooted on the same ground’ The poem still resonates in popular culture, notably in the film Dead Poets Society. It is one of four poems written by Whitman about the death of Lincoln. The other three are: ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’, ‘Hush’d Be the Camps To-day’, and ‘This Dust was Once the Man’ The poems were all written as sequels to Drum-Taps and were not specifically written as tributes to Lincoln, but as tribute to the fallen President in tribute to his life and work. The poem was Whitman’s first to be anthologized and the most popular during his lifetime. Although he never met Lincoln, Whitman felt a connection to him and was greatly moved upon Lincoln’s assassination. He later included it in the collection Leaves of Grass and recited the poem at several lectures on Lincoln’s death. Whitman’s reputation as a poet was established in the late 1850s and early 1860s with the 1855 release of leaves of Grass, which he revised many times before his death.

The praise it attracted from American transcendentalist essayist, lecturer, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson helped to foster significant interest in Whitman’s work. Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and developed a free verse style inspired by the cadences of the King James Bible. He admired the President, writing in October 1863, ‘I love the President personally’ Their literary styles and inspirations were similar. Whitman later declared: ‘There is an almost nearer me than anybody else. Their lives are almost nearer to each other than anyone else’ Whitman later wrote: ‘Lincoln gets an account of Lincoln’s poetry collection. He looks like a man! Well, he’s like a C. D. man!’ The poems do not specifically mention Lincoln, and these accounts are probably fictitious, but Whitman, who proceeded to write several poems in tribute, did not mention Lincoln’s name at all. In June 1865, James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior, found a copy of Leaves of. Grass and fired Whitman as he had been working at the Bureau of Indian Affairs, as Harlan considered the collection ‘obscene’   Whitman had been fired from his job as a Bureau of. Indian Affairs. Whitman’s brother George Washington Whitman, served in the Union Army, and was taken prisoner in Virginia on September 30, 1864, and held for five months in Libby Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near Richmond.

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