O Captain! My Captain!

On February 9, 1888, Walt Whitman penned a note to the publishers of The Riverside Literature Series No. 32 calling attention to mistakes in their recently printed version of his poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” “Somehow you have got a couple of bad perversions in ‘O Captain,'” he wrote. “I send you a corrected sheet.”

Walt Whitman Papers: Literary file; Poetry; O Captain! My Captain! Printed copy with corrections, 1888. February 9, 1888. Walt Whitman Papers (Miscellaneous Manuscript Collection). Manuscript Division

Whitman wrote “O Captain! My Captain!” in response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. He revised the poem in 1866 and again in 1871. Apparently, the Riverside editors published an earlier version of the poem. Whitman’s February 9 letter to the publishers details his changes for punctuation and entire lines of text.

Published to immediate acclaim in the Saturday Press, “O Captain! My Captain!” was the only poem from Whitman’s compendium, Leaves of Grass, widely reprinted and anthologized during his lifetime. Whitman rarely used rhymed, rhythmically regular verse, but here it creates a somber, yet exalted, effect.

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.

Abraham Lincoln, head-and-shoulders portrait. Douglas Volk, artist; photograph of a painting, [between 1908 and 1912]. Detroit Publishing Company. Prints & Photographs Division

By the 1880s, Whitman was asked to recite the poem so often he said, “I’m almost sorry I ever wrote [it],” though it had “certain emotional immediate reasons for being.”

Walt Whitman. John White Alexander, artist; photograph of a painting, [between 1900 and 1920]. Detroit Publishing Company . Prints & Photographs Division

An outpouring of communal grief and numerous efforts to memorialize the fallen leader followed Lincoln’s death. In May 1865, African-American citizens of the District of Columbia organized the Educational Monument Association to the Memory of Abraham Lincoln for the purpose of erecting a national monument to Lincoln. African American Perspectives: Materials Selected from the Rare Book Collection contains the complete text of the group’s constitution as well as the eloquent tribute that Frederick Douglass made to Lincoln at the 1876 unveiling of the Lincoln Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D. C.

Learn More

  • The Library of Congress houses the largest archival collection of Walt Whitman materials in the world, and has created a number of online features related to the poet. Browse Walt Whitman: A Resource Guide to learn more about and access these materials. Among the collections you will find is the Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection, which includes approximately 28,000 items spanning from 1763 to 1985. The bulk of the items date from the 1840s through Whitman’s death in 1892, and into the twentieth century. The collection of correspondence, literary manuscripts, books, proofs, and associated items represent periods of Whitman’s life from his early time living in New York, middle-age in Washington, D.C., and the last phase of his life in Camden, New Jersey.
  • The Thomas Biggs Harned Collection of Walt Whitman Papers consists of approximately 3,000 items (4,126 images) spanning the period 1842-1937, with most of the items dated from 1855, when Whitman first published the poem Leaves of Grass, to his death at age seventy-three in 1892. Of particular interest are the notebooks from the Civil War years in which he took notes about the needs and wants of wounded soldiers whom he visited and comforted in the hospitals in and near Washington, D.C.
  • The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana includes more than 200 sheet-music compositions that represent Lincoln and the war as reflected in popular music. The collection spans the years from Lincoln’s presidential campaign in 1859 through the 1909 centennial of Lincoln’s birth. The compiler, Alfred Whital Stern (1881-1960), is considered the greatest private collector of materials relating to the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. Search the collection on death to find plaintive tunes such as “Rest, Noble Chieftain” in which the composer extols, “Rest noble Chieftain, sweet be thy sleep And over thy grave a Nation shall weep….”
  • For more on Abraham Lincoln, explore Abraham Lincoln: A Resource Guide, through which you can find access to online and digitized Lincoln materials held at the Library of Congress, including the Library’s Abraham Lincoln Papers.