Oh Captain, My Captain

You’re listening to Walter Huston recite the words of Walt Whitman in a Decca recording from 1947 and…

You’re on the Sound Beat.

Whitman published his famous elegy to Abraham Lincoln in “Sequel to Drum-Taps”, an 1865 pamphlet containing 18 poems about the American Civil War as well as “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d”. Who said self-publishing doesn’t work?

If you are going to publish your work on your own, you’ve got to have artistic and editorial vision. Whitman kept revising the poem, even after publication, and even corrected newspaper editors for using earlier versions.