The Poem O Captain my Captain by Walt Whitman

First of all, “O Captain, My Captain” uses extended metaphors, while “Shiloh: A Requiem” does not. Walt Whitman uses many extended metaphors, such as “Captain” referring to Abraham Lincoln, and “fearful trip” meaning the Civil War. This shows how “O Captain, My Captain” uses extended metaphors to give the poem a deeper meaning than it seems. Meanwhile, Herman Melville does not use extended metaphors in his poem. Additionally, “Shiloh: A Requiem” uses personification to convey the mood, and “O Captain, My Captain” does not. For example, Herman Melville uses the phrase “The church so lone” to help convey the mood. This shows personification because loneliness is an emotion, and an inanimate object cannot feel emotions. However, “O Captain, My Captain” does not use personification in the poem. In conclusion, this shows that the two authors use unique means to get their messages

How does Walt Whitman use figurative language in O Captain! My Captain! to impact the readers. One of the first examples of figurative language in O Captain! my Captain! is an allusion. Two allusions are located on the second line in the first stanza, it says “The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won,”. Whitman's uses of allusions are easier to understand if you know history because the ship represents the nation and the prize was the win of the Civil War. Walt Whitman used allusions because if they are constructed well then, the reader may feel more apart of the story and it can capture their attention to keep them interested. Another example of figurative language in the poem is imagery. One use of imagery I found was

In “Song of Myself” Whitman attempts to speak on behalf of the entire American population. He tries to pull the reader into a world of many possibilities. Whitman makes a

Captain Lincoln Steers the Ship to victory. “Where on the deck my captain lies Fallen cold and dead.”(7-8) This quote from the story refers to the assassination of President Lincoln. Abraham Lincoln was President during the Civil War, and is considered to be one of the greatest presidents of all time. President Lincoln was assassinated on April 14,1865 and was in a coma for 9 hours before he died. With the death of the President the nation lost it’s most important man and a great father and husband. The elegy “O Captain! My Captain!” by Walt Whitman is an extended metaphor about President Lincoln’s presidency because it compares Lincoln to a ships captain, the Union

Walt Whitman listened to the warriors’ battle stories and used them as inspiration for some of his poems. Through his volunteer work, Whitman saw firsthand the debilitating effect the war had on the soldiers’ mental health and their physical injuries, all of which were difficult to treat due to the insufficient amount of supplies and knowledgeable people present to help. All of his work with those who served during the Civil War served as inspiration for Walt Whitman’s collection of wartime poems known as the Drum-Taps. Whitman’s rise to fame is accredited to his poem “O’ Captain, My Captain!” which was published shortly following the assassination of United States president, Abraham Lincoln. However, this traditional poem varied from the majority of his work that was lined passionately with words representing connections between a body and its soul. From the collection of Drum-Taps, the poem “A Sight in Camp in the Daybreak Gray and Grim” describes Whitman arriving at the hospital where he sees the three unattended dead bodies. In each individual stanza, he describes each of the victims.

Walt Whitman, a democratic poet, celebrated himself and his connection with the world by writing “Song of Myself” in 1855. According to Eric Forsythe, “Throughout the poem, Whitman probes the question of how large the new democratic self can become before it dissipates into contradiction and fragmentation, and each time he seems to reach the limit, he dilates even more” (Forsythe). The poem shaped the idea of what it meant to be an American, by bringing citizens together. It also foreshadowed the Civil War, which began in 1861, through a symbol of grass. In “Song of Myself,” Whitman’s themes of individualism and carpe diem developed from the transcendentalist movement.

Often times people use poetry to tell a story, or show how they feel about a topic. The poet Walt Whitman does this in his Poem “Oh Captain! My Captain!”. This poem tells the story of one of Whitman’s idol’s legacy and death. Walt Whitman portrays American Romanticism through “Oh Captain! My Captain!” to describe Abraham Lincoln’s life.

The people in his poem are common folk without individual names, but in his celebratory verse they are all idealized. Each one finds joy in the dignity of his or her labor. In eleven lines of verse, the word "singing" appears eleven times, or twelve if you include the title. The word is used figuratively to reflect happy pride in performance of labor. This is a poem that voices American democracy. Its language is muscular, its pulse vibrant, its mood exultant. We will hear similar tonalities and exuberance in the free verse of Carl Sandburg, who was 14 when Whitman died.

Whitman wrote broad stanzas and focused on the whole of America as his inspiration. His lines covered a wide range of topics and generated multiple points of view for the reader. He called his life’s work “Leaves of Grass”; stressing the

Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself" is a vision of the American spirit, a vision of Whitman himself. It is his cry for democracy, giving each of us a voice through his poetry. Each of us has a voice and desires, and this is Whitman's representation of our voices, the voice of America. America, the great melting pot, was founded for freedom and democracy, and this poem is his way of re-instilling these lost American ideals. In this passage from "Song of Myself" Whitman speaks through his fellow man and speaks for his fellow man when his voice is not socially acceptable to be heard.

America experienced profound changes during the mid 1800’s. New technologies and ideas helped the nation grow, while the Civil War ripped the nation apart. During this tumultuous period, two great American writers captured their ideas in poetry. Their poems give us insight into the time period, as well as universal insight about life. Although polar opposites in personality, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman created similar poetry. Dickinson’s “Hope is a Thing with Feathers” and Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” share many qualities.

“O Captain! My Captain!” is one of the most popular poems ever written by Walt Whitman. Upon the initial reading of this poem, one may perceive the poem to be about a loyal captain who leads his crew on a treacherous, but successful, voyage which ends in devastation. If interpreted literally this is the poem’s only meaning, but for those who look further there is an underlying story behind the words of Whitman. Whitman uses multiple literary elements throughout this poem in order to unmask the story of Abraham Lincoln’s journey and ultimate death as a result of the Civil War and his fight to end slavery.

In his first anthology of poems entitled “Song of Myself”, Walt Whitman reveals some of his views on democracy through the use of symbolism and free verse poetry. His use of symbolism and free verse poetry creates indeterminacy, giving the reader hints rather than answers about the nature of the poem. In the sixth part of “Song of Myself”, a child asks the narrator of the poem, “What is the grass?” (Whitman). Instead of simply giving an answer, the narrator cannot make up his mind, and stumbles on how to explain the grass to the child. Through the use of specific symbolisms, Whitman, as the narrator, explicates his views while remaining under the façade of explaining grass to the child. The views Whitman conveys remain indeterminate and

“I celebrate myself, and sing myself / and what I shall assume you shall assume” (Whitman 1-2). These lines not only open up the beginning of one the best poems of the American Romantic period, but they also represent a prominent theme of one of this period’s best poet, Walt Whitman. In Walt Whitman’s Song of Myself, Whitman deals with his time period’s most prominent theme of democracy. Whitman tells readers that they must not only observe the democratic life but they must become one with it. As Whitman states, “For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (3). Democracy provides a connection with all people. It is as if Joseph Stella felt this connection and decided to depict it in his collection of paintings entitled “Americans in the Rough.” The individual is of no greater or lesser worth than anyone else. Beatrice Marovich states that, “It is a song for fellow Americans, about the American body politic” (349). An analysis of Song of Myself portrays that understanding and becoming one with democracy through political collectivity essentially sets the stage for the American democratic self. Joseph Stella does a great job of interpreting and depicting Whitman’s ideals of democracy through his illustrations representing every facet of an American democratic life.

President Abraham Lincoln, admired by Walt Whitman, blossomed in “Whitman's writing and in American mythology”(Eiselein) for his leadership and nobility. Whitman hoped for a rugged, healthy, who knew what real, physical work was, to be the “[r]edeemer [p]resident of [t]hese [s]tates”(Whitman). His hopes came true “as in a dream”(Whitman) when “four years later, just such a beard-faced boatman”(Goodheart) entered the White House. Walt Whitman discovered the “comprehensive, all-directing soul he had long been seeking”(Reynolds) in Abraham Lincoln’s life. Therefore Whitman, a patriotic American, would see Lincoln’s death as not only a grave tragedy but also a “promise [of] ultimate purgation and unification for America.”(Reynolds).