Introduction

The poem "O Captain! My Captain!," a meditation on the death of President Abraham Lincoln, was written by Walt Whitman in 1865, and included in his controversial and widely acclaimed collection Leaves of Grass. The eighth and final edition of Leaves of Grass, which was initially published in 1855 and saw seven subsequent revisions, was published in 1889. The last edition is known as the "deathbed edition" because Whitman worked on it close to the year of his death, 1892. Some claim that the deathbed edition represents the completed and authentic version of Leaves of Grass, since it bears the stamp of Whitman's final touches and revisions. Whitman himself considered this version the most complete. That edition places "O Captain! My Captain!," Whitman's threnody—a poem of mourning after a person's death—on...