Walt Whit­man (1819–1892) was an Amer­i­can poet, essay­ist, and jour­nal­ist, famous for his major poet­ry col­lec­tion Leaves of Grass, first pub­lished in 1855 and revised mul­ti­ple times before his death in 1892 (the first edi­tion con­sist­ed of only 12 poems; the final edi­tion con­tained near­ly 400). The col­lec­tion rep­re­sents a cel­e­bra­tion of Whitman’s phi­los­o­phy of life and human­i­ty, and focus­es on nature and the indi­vid­ual human’s role in it, rather than focus­ing on reli­gious or spir­i­tu­al mat­ters.

Most of Whit­man’s poems are writ­ten in free verse and nei­ther rhyme nor fol­low stan­dard rules for meter and line length. If that was con­tro­ver­sial to the purist, so was his use of explic­it sex­u­al imagery, and his col­lec­tion was lam­bast­ed at the time (though cham­pi­oned by influ­en­tial fig­ures like Ralph Wal­do Emer­son and Hen­ry David Thore­au). Over time, how­ev­er, the col­lec­tion has infil­trat­ed pop­u­lar cul­ture and became rec­og­nized as one of the cen­tral works of Amer­i­can poet­ry.

In the 1989 film Dead Poets Soci­ety (set in 1959), Robin Williams’ Eng­lish teacher John Keat­ing advo­cates doing away with the restric­tions of poet­ic rules in order to give cre­ativ­i­ty free rein. He encour­ages his stu­dents to “make your life extra­or­di­nary” and “seize the day” and incites them to rip out the page on dry poet­ic rules from their text­books. His unortho­dox teach­ing meth­ods inevitably attract the atten­tion of strict head­mas­ter Gale Nolan, who con­trives to remove the heretic. As Mr Keat­ing enters the class­room to col­lect his belong­ings, the inspired stu­dents express their sol­i­dar­i­ty by climb­ing on to their desks and quot­ing the open­ing line from Whitman’s O Cap­tain! My Cap­tain! (though iron­i­cal­ly this poem does rhyme).

Dur­ing the Amer­i­can Civ­il War, Whit­man, a staunch Union­ist, had worked in hos­pi­tals car­ing for the wound­ed, and his poet­ry often focused on both loss and heal­ing. O Cap­tain! My Cap­tain! was writ­ten in response to the death of Abra­ham Lin­coln, whom Whit­man great­ly admired, and who had been assas­si­nat­ed in April 1865 just as his great work was com­ing to fruition. The three-stan­za poem uses a ship and its dead cap­tain as a metaphor for the Union­ist cause and Lin­coln him­self.

Ezra Pound called Whit­man “Amer­i­ca’s poet…He is Amer­i­ca”. Well, let’s hear the poem recit­ed and then let’s enjoy the emo­tion­al pow­er of that final scene in Dead Poets Soci­ety.

O Cap­tain! my Cap­tain! our fear­ful trip is done,
The ship has weather’d 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.

O Cap­tain! my Cap­tain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills,
For you bou­quets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a‑crowding,
For you they call, the sway­ing mass, their eager faces turn­ing;
Here Cap­tain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck,
You’ve fall­en cold and dead.

My Cap­tain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will,
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voy­age closed and done,
From fear­ful trip the vic­tor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I with mourn­ful tread,
Walk the deck my Cap­tain lies,
Fall­en cold and dead.