"O Captain! My Captain!" is an extended metaphor poem written by Walt Whitman in 1865 about the death of U.S. president Abraham Lincoln. Well received upon publication, the poem was Whitman's first to be anthologized and the most popular during his lifetime. Together with "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", and "This Dust Was Once the Man", it is one of four poems written by Whitman about the death of Lincoln.
During the American Civil War, Whitman moved to Washington, D.C., where he worked for the government and volunteered at hospitals. Although he never met Lincoln, Whitman felt a connection to him and was greatly moved by Lincoln's assassination. "My Captain" was first published in The Saturday Press on November 4, 1865, and appeared in Sequel to Drum-Taps later that year. He later included it in the collection Leaves of Grass and recited the poem at several lectures on Lincoln's death.
Stylistically, the poem is uncharacteristic of Whitman's poetry because of its rhyming, song-like flow, and simple "ship of state" metaphor. These elements likely contributed to the poem's initial positive reception and popularity, with many celebrating it as one of the greatest American works of poetry. Critical opinion has shifted since the mid-20th century, with some scholars deriding it as conventional and unoriginal. The poem has made several appearances in popular culture; as it never mentions Lincoln, it has been invoked upon the death of several other heads of state. It is famously featured in Dead Poets Society (1989) and is frequently associated with the star of that film, Robin Williams.
Background Walt Whitman established his reputation as a poet in the late 1850s to early 1860s with the 1855 release of Leaves of Grass. Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and developed a free verse style inspired by the cadences of the King James Bible. The brief volume, first released in 1855, was considered controversial by some, with critics particularly objecting to Whitman's blunt depictions of sexuality and the poem's "homoerotic overtones". Whitman's work received significant attention following praise for Leaves of Grass by American transcendentalist lecturer and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.
At the start of the American Civil War, Whitman moved from New York to Washington, D.C., where he held a series of government jobs—first with the Army Paymaster's Office and later with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He volunteered in the army hospitals as a nurse. Whitman's poetry was informed by his wartime experience, maturing into reflections on death and youth, the brutality of war, and patriotism. Whitman's brother, Union Army soldier George Washington Whitman, was taken prisoner in Virginia in September 1864, and held for five months in Libby Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near Richmond. On February 24, 1865, George was granted a furlough to return home because of his poor health, and Whitman travelled to his mother's home in New York to visit his brother. While visiting Brooklyn, Whitman contracted to have his collection of Civil War poems, Drum-Taps, published. In June 1865, James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior, found a copy of Leaves of Grass and, considering the collection vulgar, fired Whitman from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Whitman and Lincoln
Although they never met, Whitman saw Abraham Lincoln several times between 1861 and 1865, sometimes at close quarters. The first time was when Lincoln stopped in New York City in 1861 on his way to Washington. Whitman noticed the president-elect's "striking appearance" and "unpretentious dignity", and trusted Lincoln's "supernatural tact" and "idiomatic Western genius". He admired the president, writing in October 1863: "I love the President personally." Whitman considered himself and Lincoln to be "afloat in the same stream" and "rooted in the same ground". Whitman and Lincoln shared similar views on slavery and the Union, and similarities have been noted in their literary styles and inspirations. Whitman later declared: "Lincoln gets almost nearer me than anybody else."
There is an account of Lincoln's reading Whitman's Leaves of Grass poetry collection in his office,: "A clerk in Lincoln's law office in Springfield recalled that before he became president, Lincoln had read aloud from Leaves of Grass to his office mates," citing . and another of the president's saying "Well, he looks like a man," upon seeing Whitman in Washington, D.C.: citing . According to scholar John Matteson: "[t]he truth of both these stories is hard to establish." Lincoln's death on April 15, 1865, greatly moved Whitman, who wrote several poems in tribute to the fallen president. "O Captain! My Captain!", "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", and "This Dust Was Once the Man" were all written on Lincoln's death. While these poems do not specifically mention Lincoln, they turn the assassination of the president into a sort of martyrdom.
Text
Publication history
Literary critic Helen Vendler thinks it likely that Whitman wrote the poem before "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", considering it a direct response to "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day". An early draft of the poem is written in free verse. "My Captain" was first published in The Saturday Press on November 4, 1865. Around the same time, it was included in Whitman's book, Sequel to Drum-Tapspublication in The Saturday Press was considered a "teaser" for the book. Although Sequel to Drum-Taps was first published in early October 1865, the copies were not ready for distribution until December. The first publication of the poem had different punctuation than Whitman intended, and he corrected before its next publication. It was also included in the 1867 edition of Leaves of Grass. Whitman revised the poem several times during his life, including in his 1871 collection Passage to India. Its final republication by Whitman was in the 1881 edition of Leaves of Grass.
Whitman's friend Horace Traubel wrote in his book With Walt Whitman in Camden that Whitman read a newspaper article that said "If Walt Whitman had written a volume of My Captains instead of filling a scrapbasket with waste and calling it a book the world would be better off today and Walt Whitman would have some excuse for living." Whitman responded to the article on September 11, 1888, saying: "Damn My Captain... I'm almost sorry I ever wrote the poem," though he admitted that it "had certain emotional immediate reasons for being". In the 1870s and 1880s, Whitman gave several lectures over eleven years on Lincoln's death. He usually began or ended the lectures by reciting "My Captain", despite his growing prominence meaning he could have read a different poem. In the late 1880s, Whitman earned money by selling autographed copies of "My Captain"—purchasers included John Hay, Charles Aldrich, and S. Weir Mitchell.
Style The poem rhymes using an AABBCDED rhyme scheme, and is designed for recitation. It is written in nine quatrains, organized in three stanzas. Each stanza has two quatrains of four seven-beat lines, followed by a four-line refrain, which changes slightly from stanza to stanza, in a tetrameter/trimeter ballad beat. Historian Daniel Mark Epstein wrote in 2004 that he considers the structure of the poem to be "uncharacteristically mechanical, formulaic". He described the poem as a conventional ballad, comparable to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and much of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's work, especially "In Memoriam A.H.H." Literary critic Jerome Loving wrote to the opposite effect in 1999, saying that the structure gave "My Captain" a "sing-song" quality, evocative of folk groups like the Hutchinson Family Singers and Cheney Family Singers. The scholar Ted Genoways argued that the poem retains distinctive features characteristic to Whitman, such as varying line length. Whitman very rarely wrote poems that rhymed; in a review contemporary to Whitman, The Atlantic suggested that Whitman was rising "above himself" by writing a poem unlike his others. The writer elaborated that, while his previous work had represented "unchecked nature", the rhymes of "My Captain" were a sincere expression of emotion.
The author Frances Winwar argued in her 1941 book American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times that "in the simple ballad rhythm beat the heart of the folk". Vendler concludes that Whitman's use of a simple style is him saying that "soldiers and sailors have a right to verse written for them". Using elements of popular poetry enabled Whitman to create a poem that he felt would be understood by the general public. In 2009, academic Amanda Gailey argued that Whitman—who, writing the poem, had just been fired from his government job—adopted a conventional style to attract a wider audience. She added that Whitman wrote to heal the nation, crafting a poem the country would find "ideologically and aesthetically satisfactory". William Pannapacker, a literature professor, similarly described the poem in 2004 as a "calculated critical and commercial success". In 2003, the author Daniel Aaron wrote that "Death enshrined the Commoner [Lincoln], [and] Whitman placed himself and his work in the reflected limelight". As an elegy to Lincoln, the English professor Faith Barrett wrote in 2005 that the style makes it "timeless", following in the tradition of elegies like "Lycidas" and "Adonais".
Reception The poem was Whitman's most popular during his lifetime, and the only one to be anthologized before his death. The historian Michael C. Cohen noted that "My Captain" was "carried beyond the limited circulation of Leaves of Grass and into the popular heart"; its popularity remade "history in the form of a ballad". Initial reception to the poem was very positive. In early 1866, a reviewer in the Boston Commonwealth wrote that the poem was the most moving dirge for Lincoln ever written, [originally unsigned] adding that Drum Taps "will do much[...] to remove the prejudice against Mr. Whitman in many minds". Similarly, after reading Sequel to Drum Taps, the author William Dean Howells became convinced that Whitman had cleaned the "old channels of their filth" and poured "a stream of blameless purity" through; he would become a prominent defender of Whitman. One of the earliest criticisms of the poem was authored by Edward P. Mitchell in 1881 who considered the rhymes "crude". "My Captain" is considered uncharacteristic of Whitman's poetry, and it was praised initially as a departure from his typical style. Author Julian Hawthorne wrote in 1891 that the poem was touching partially because it was such a stylistic departure. In 1892, The Atlantic wrote that "My Captain" was universally accepted as Whitman's "one great contribution to the world's literature", and George Rice Carpenter, a scholar and biographer of Whitman, said in 1903 that the poem was possibly the best work of Civil War poetry, praising its imagery as "beautiful".