O Captain! My Captain!

• 1. Introduction

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  "O Captain! My Captain!" is the poem that Walt Whitman once said he was "almost sorry" he had ever written. Published in The Saturday Press on the 4th of November 1865, it greeted a nation still raw from Abraham Lincoln's assassination seven months earlier. Whitman had seen Lincoln in person multiple times between 1861 and 1865 without ever exchanging a word, yet Lincoln's death on the 15th of April 1865 hit him with the force of personal grief. The poem became the most popular verse Whitman would ever produce during his lifetime -- and also the work that would most embarrass him. How a free-verse rebel who prided himself on "unchecked nature" came to write something critics later called "near doggerel" is one question this story answers. Why that same poem then outlasted his entire body of work in the popular imagination is another.

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• 2. The Poet Before the Poem

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  Whitman's 1855 volume Leaves of Grass established him as a new and controversial American voice. Some critics objected to his blunt depictions of sexuality and what they described as the collection's "homoerotic overtones". Attention crested when the transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson praised the work, pulling Whitman into the mainstream debate about what American literature could be. Whitman had set out to write a distinctly American epic, developing a free verse style drawn from the cadences of the King James Bible.

  When the Civil War began, Whitman left New York for Washington, D.C., holding a series of government jobs -- first with the Army Paymaster's Office, then with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. He volunteered in army hospitals as a nurse, and those years of witnessing death and youth reshaped his poetry into something harder and more interior. His brother George Washington Whitman, a Union Army soldier, was captured in Virginia in September 1864 and held for five months in Libby Prison, a Confederate prisoner-of-war camp near Richmond. George was granted a furlough home in February 1865 because of his poor health, and Whitman traveled to his mother's home in New York to visit him. During that Brooklyn visit, Whitman arranged the publication of Drum-Taps, his collection of Civil War poems. In June 1865, the Secretary of the Interior, James Harlan, found a copy of Leaves of Grass in the Bureau's offices, deemed it vulgar, and fired Whitman on the spot.

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• 3. A Bond Never Spoken Aloud

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  The first time Whitman saw Abraham Lincoln was in 1861, when the president-elect passed through New York City on his way to Washington. Whitman noted Lincoln's "striking appearance" and "unpretentious dignity", and trusted what he called Lincoln's "supernatural tact" and "idiomatic Western genius". By October 1863 he was writing: "I love the President personally." He considered himself and Lincoln to be "afloat in the same stream" and "rooted in the same ground", noting similar views on slavery and the Union, and what scholars have called parallels in their literary styles.

  Neither man ever spoke to the other. There is an account of Lincoln reading from Leaves of Grass aloud in his Springfield law office before his presidency, and another of Lincoln saying "Well, he looks like a man" upon spotting Whitman in Washington. Scholar John Matteson concluded that "the truth of both these stories is hard to establish." Yet Whitman would later declare: "Lincoln gets almost nearer me than anybody else." When Lincoln died on the 15th of April 1865, Whitman responded with four poems. None of them named Lincoln directly; all of them turned his assassination into something closer to martyrdom.

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• 4. Form as Strategy

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  Literary critic Helen Vendler believes Whitman likely wrote "O Captain! My Captain!" before "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", treating it as a direct response to the earlier short elegy "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day". An early draft of the poem exists in free verse, which makes the final version's tight formal structure all the more striking. The finished poem rhymes in an AABBCDED scheme, runs to nine quatrains arranged in three stanzas, and moves to a tetrameter/trimeter ballad beat -- the same pulse found in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "In Memoriam A.H.H."

  Whitman very rarely wrote poems that rhymed. In a review published in The Atlantic at the time, the writer suggested Whitman was rising "above himself", adding that while his previous work had represented "unchecked nature", the rhymes here were a sincere expression of emotion. Scholar Ted Genoways argued the poem still carries Whitman's fingerprints through its varying line lengths. Academic Amanda Gailey argued in 2009 that Whitman -- who had just lost his government job when he wrote the poem -- adopted the conventional style deliberately to attract a wider audience, crafting a poem the country would find "ideologically and aesthetically satisfactory". Literature professor William Pannapacker called it in 2004 a "calculated critical and commercial success".

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• 5. The Metaphor and Its Layers

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  Whitman had used the ship-of-state image before, in his earlier story "Death in the School-Room". By the 19th of March 1863, he had also written a letter comparing a head of state to a ship's captain. The poem's nautical frame carried an additional resonance: Whitman had likely read newspaper reports that Lincoln dreamed of a ship under full sail the night before his assassination, an image said to recur before major events in Lincoln's life.

  The poem tracks Lincoln from captain to "dear father" to corpse across its three stanzas. Literary critic Helen Vendler reads the poem's narrator as a young Union recruit -- a "sailor-boy" addressing Lincoln like a father -- who watches the ship reach port just as the captain falls. In the first two stanzas the narrator speaks directly to Lincoln as "you"; by the third stanza Lincoln becomes "he", spoken of rather than to. Literature professor Michael C. Cohen argues the metaphor works to "mask the violence of the Civil War" and projects "that concealment onto the exulting crowds", converting public violence into shared loss. Scholar Stefan Schöberlein adds that the second and third stanzas invoke religious imagery, casting Lincoln as a messianic figure; Schöberlein draws a specific parallel to Correggio's 1525 Deposition, noting that the poem's speaker placing an arm beneath Lincoln's head echoes Mary cradling Jesus after the crucifixion.

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• 6. Praise, Doubt, and Disappearance

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  Initial reception was strongly positive. In early 1866, a reviewer in the Boston Commonwealth called the poem the most moving dirge for Lincoln yet written. Author William Dean Howells, reading Sequel to Drum-Taps, became a prominent defender of Whitman. By 1892, The Atlantic wrote that "My Captain" was universally accepted as Whitman's "one great contribution to the world's literature". In 1916, Lincoln biographer Henry B. Rankin called it "the nation's -- aye, the world's -- funeral dirge of our First American". The Literary Digest in 1919 considered it the "most likely to live forever" of Whitman's poems.

  Whitman himself soured on it. His friend Horace Traubel recorded in With Walt Whitman in Camden that Whitman read a newspaper article suggesting the world would be better off if he had written a whole volume of "My Captains" instead of his other work. On the 11th of September 1888 Whitman responded: "Damn My Captain... I'm almost sorry I ever wrote the poem," while admitting it "had certain emotional immediate reasons for being". The reversal in critical opinion came after the mid-20th century. Scholar Joseph Csicsila found that the poem had been Whitman's most frequently published work in American anthologies, then after World War II it "all but disappeared", and had "virtually disappeared" after 1966. By 1997, scholar Gay Wilson Allen concluded the poem's symbols were "trite", the rhythm "artificial", and the rhymes "erratic". Poet C. K. Williams called it in 2010 a "truly awful piece of near doggerel triteness".

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• 7. Lives Beyond Lincoln

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  Because "O Captain! My Captain!" never names Lincoln, it has been available for every subsequent loss. After Franklin D. Roosevelt died in 1945, actor Charles Laughton read it during a memorial radio broadcast. When John F. Kennedy was assassinated on the 22nd of November 1963, the poem played on many radio stations. Following the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the poem was translated into Hebrew and set to music by Naomi Shemer.

  The 1989 film Dead Poets Society gave the poem a second life in popular culture. Robin Williams played John Keating, an English teacher at Welton Academy who introduces the poem in his first class. When Keating is fired and returns to collect his belongings, his students stand on their desks and address him as "O Captain! My Captain!" UCLA literature professor Michael C. Cohen noted the scene's irony: the students use a poem Whitman designed to be conventionally conformist as an act of resistance against "repressive conformity". After Robin Williams died in 2014, the hashtag "#ocaptainmycaptain" trended on Twitter, and fans recreated the desk-standing scene in tribute. Film critic Luke Buckmaster wrote in The Guardian that "some people, maybe even most people, now associate Whitman's verse first and foremost with a movie rather than a poem". The poem was also widely quoted on Twitter as Barack Obama left office and Donald Trump took over -- the ship of state, once more, changing hands at sea.

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