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Oh captain my captain meaning11/11/2023 ![]() Among Williams’s most beloved films is the 1989 classic Dead Poets Society, in which Whitman’s poem serves as a centerpiece - Williams’s character instructs his students to call him “O Captain! My Captain” - and it appears in one of the film’s most memorable scenes: The recurrence of Whitman’s grim refrain in the context of Robin Williams’s suicide is strange and poignant happenstance. While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring: The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting, The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won ![]() O Captain! My Captain! our fearful trip is done It was an allusion to Walt Whitman’s 1865 elegy “O Captain! My Captain!,” a mourning poem for Abraham Lincoln titled after its piercing refrain: In the introduction to Quack This Way - the remarkable record of Bryan Garner’s wide-ranging conversation with David Foster Wallace - Garner makes a passing mention of the email address Wallace used in their correspondence: The email provider following the symbol changed over the years, but Wallace kept his moniker - one that takes on a special, wistful meaning in light of his subsequent suicide.
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