Who wrote the poem "O Captain! My Captain!"?

Walt Whitman wrote “O Captain! My Captain!” as a mournful poem about Abraham Lincoln’s death.

Whitman wrote it in 1865, after Lincoln was assassinated near the end of the American Civil War. Its central image is an extended metaphor: the United States is a ship returning victorious to port, while its captain—Lincoln—lies dead on deck. The poem never names Lincoln directly, but the symbolism was clear to contemporary readers.

The poem first appeared in The Saturday Press on November 4, 1865, and later entered Whitman’s collections, including Leaves of Grass. Its regular rhyme and songlike structure made it unusually accessible compared with Whitman’s freer, more experimental verse.

A common mix-up comes from Dead Poets Society, where the poem is strongly associated with Robin Williams’s character, John Keating. The film helped popularize it, but the author was the 19th-century American poet Walt Whitman, not a modern writer or the film’s creators.