Walt Whitman, “O Captain! My Captain! (1865)

Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892) grew up in Long Island and Brooklyn, New York, apprenticing to become a printer until he turned to teaching and then eventually to journalism.  Regardless, Whitman was devoted to reading and writing from an early age.  He self-published his first volume of poetry, Leaves of Grass, in 1855 (where “Song of Myself” first appeared, untitled) and then kept revising and expanding the volume over the remaining decades of his life.  During the Civil War, Whitman returned to newspaper work, writing for New York newspapers as an occasional correspondent based in Washington, where he also volunteered as a nurse in wartime hospitals.   In the summer of 1863, Whitman wrote a column for the New York Times describing Abraham Lincoln, whom he noted he saw “almost every day” as the president rode into the White House from his summer cottage at the Soldiers’ Home, a military community on the outskirts of town (and like a 19th-century Camp David presidential retreat).  “O, Captain! My Captain!” was Whitman’s elegy to Lincoln after his assassination in 1865. Whitman lived in Washington for years following Lincoln’s death, before eventually settling in New Jersey.  Whitman became celebrated as an American poet while he was alive during the decades after the Civil War.  Dubbed “America’s world poet,” by the Poetry Foundation, and exalted as “a latter-day successor to Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare,” Whitman today is regarded by many critics as the nation’s greatest poet.