Walt Whitman
By Gabriel Lott
Bio
Walt Whitman, one of the greatest poets in American
history, was born on May 31, 1819. Whitman was selftaught, reading extensively from the classics of ancient
Greece, Shakespeare, and the Bible. Whitman started a
long career in journalism that exposed him to the evils of
his society, such as slavery and corrupt politics.
Whitman’s first work, Leaves of Grass, a collection of
unnamed poems, was self-printed in 1855 and would go
on to become his epic masterpiece and lifework. Leaves
of Grass gained popularity, attracting the attention of
the great Ralph Waldo Emerson, who encouraged
Whitman and his revolutionary style of free verse
poetry. He later became a hospital worker during the
Civil War and began to care for the wounded in
Washington, D.C. Whitman’s sexuality has been an
object of uncertainty, with numerous sources stating
that Whitman was either homosexual or bisexual.
Whitman was also known for his deism and
transcendentalist philosophy. He rejected all forms of
organized religion, and evaluated each group in his
poetry. Whitman retired to New Jersey in 1873 to care
for his dying mother, and stayed there until his own
death in 1892.
O Captain! My Captain!
By Walt Whitman, 1865
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
“O Captain! My Captain!”
“O Captain! My Captain!” is an extended metaphor poem
written in 1865 by Walt Whitman, inspired by the death of
American president Abraham Lincoln. Walt Whitman wrote
the poem shortly after Lincoln's assassination. The "ship" in
the poem represents the United States of America, while
its "fearful trip" is a reference to the American Civil War.
The titular "Captain" is Lincoln himself. Whitman used
conventional meter and rhyme scheme, unusual for
Whitman, and it was the only poem anthologized during
Whitman's lifetime. The rhyme scheme for the poem is
AABCDEFE, GGHIJEKE, LLMNOEPE. "O Captain" became the
most recited and popular of Whitman's works and, until
recently, was his most anthologized poem. Whitman
insisted that “O Captain!” had a significant emotional and
historically necessary purpose. In 1996, Israeli songwriter
Naomi Shemer translated the poem to Hebrew and wrote
music for it as a tribute to Yitzhak Rabin, who was
assassinated in 1995.
Criticism of “O Captain!”
Critic Gregory Eiselein writes that “The poem
makes deliberate use of traditional metaphors,
picturing the Union as a ship and the president
as its captain. Although the ship has weathered
the storm and re-entered the harbor safe and
victorious, the captain (like the recently
assassinated Lincoln) is dead. Capturing the
triumph and grief of the war's end, "O Captain"
is a public poem for a mass audience, an elegy
remembering a beloved president. “
Sources
• http://www.poetryarchive.com/w/o_captain_my_captain.html
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/O_Captain!_My_
Captain!
• http://www.whitmanarchive.org/criticism/cur
rent/encyclopedia/entry_40.html
• http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/126
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman