A Study Guide (New Edition) for Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide (New Edition) for Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!", excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781535867900

Book preview

17

O Captain! My Captain!

Walt Whitman

1865

Introduction

O Captain! My Captain! is one of Walt Whitman's best-known poems. It was published in the Saturday Press in November 1865 and subsequently in Sequel to Drum-Taps (1865–1866), a collection of eighteen poems mostly dealing with the Civil War. Whitman later placed it in the Memories of President Lincoln section of Leaves of Grass in the 1881 edition. The poem is a tribute to President Abraham Lincoln, who was assassinated in April 1865. It can be thought of as an elegy or a funeral ode. Unlike most of Whitman's poems, it is written in conventional rhyme and meter, with each of the three stanzas containing a refrain. O Captain! My Captain! was Whitman's most popular poem in his lifetime, even though Whitman regretted the fact that it received so much attention at the expense of other poems of his that he felt were far superior. The poem continues today to be one of the most famous poems in American literature, frequently anthologized. It has not, however, been much loved by literary critics of the late twentieth century and beyond.

Author Biography

One of the greatest of all American poets, Whitman was born on May 31, 1819, in West Hills, a village near Huntingdon, on Long Island, New York. His father, Walter Whitman, was a farmer and carpenter who for most of his life struggled to make a good living. Whitman was the second of nine children. When he was three, the family moved to Brooklyn, where his father speculated in real estate. Whitman attended school in Brooklyn for six years, but this was the end of his formal education. In 1830, at the age of eleven, he was sent to work as an office boy in a legal firm.

Blessed with a bright and inquisitive mind, the young Whitman read extensively in the local library, attended plays and lectures, and