"o Captain! My Captain!" - Walt Whitman - 1865
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 Abraham Lincoln in a section called "Memories of Lincoln."
"O Captain! My Captain!" originally belonged to a set of poems written and added, in the context of Lincoln's assassination, to the collection Drum-Taps (1865). The very title of Drum-Taps recalls the sounds of the just-ended war. The poems in this collection are a written testament to the impact the Civil War had on Whitman's poetry and selfhood.
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