Together with "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day", and "This Dust Was Once the Man", it is one of four poems written by Whitman about the death of Lincoln.

These elements likely contributed to the poem's initial positive reception and popularity, with many celebrating it as one of the greatest American works of poetry.

Whitman intended to write a distinctly American epic and developed a free verse style inspired by the cadences of the King James Bible.

[2][3] The brief volume, first released in 1855, was considered controversial by some,[4] with critics particularly objecting to Whitman's blunt depictions of sexuality and the poem's "homoerotic overtones".

[5] Whitman's work received significant attention following praise for Leaves of Grass by American transcendentalist lecturer and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson.

[6][7] At the start of the American Civil War, Whitman moved from New York to Washington, D.C., where he held a series of government jobs—first with the Army Paymaster's Office and later with the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

[10] Whitman's poetry was informed by his wartime experience, maturing into reflections on death and youth, the brutality of war, and patriotism.

[14] In June 1865, James Harlan, the Secretary of the Interior, found a copy of Leaves of Grass and, considering the collection vulgar, fired Whitman from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.

Whitman noticed the president-elect's "striking appearance" and "unpretentious dignity", and trusted Lincoln's "supernatural tact" and "idiomatic Western genius".

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!

Literary critic Helen Vendler thinks it likely that Whitman wrote the poem before "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd", considering it a direct response to "Hush'd Be the Camps To-Day".

[34][35][36][29] In the late 1880s, Whitman earned money by selling autographed copies of "My Captain"—purchasers included John Hay, Charles Aldrich, and S. Weir Mitchell.

[42] He goes on to describe the poem as a conventional ballad, comparable to Samuel Taylor Coleridge's writing in "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" and much of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's work, especially "In Memoriam A.H.H.

[36][43] The scholar Ted Genoways argued that the poem retains distinctive features characteristic to Whitman, such as varying line length.

The writer elaborated that, while his previous work had represented "unchecked nature", the rhymes of "My Captain" were a sincere expression of emotion.

[45] The author Frances Winwar argued in her 1941 book American Giant: Walt Whitman and His Times that "in the simple ballad rhythm beat the heart of the folk".

[23][40] In 2009, academic Amanda Gailey argued that Whitman—who, writing the poem, had just been fired from his government job—adopted a conventional style to attract a wider audience.

She added that Whitman wrote to heal the nation, crafting a poem the country would find "ideologically and aesthetically satisfactory".

[48] In 2003, the author Daniel Aaron wrote that "Death enshrined the Commoner [Lincoln], [and] Whitman placed himself and his work in the reflected limelight".

In early 1866, a reviewer in the Boston Commonwealth wrote that the poem was the most moving dirge for Lincoln ever written,[24][52] adding that Drum Taps "will do much [...] to remove the prejudice against Mr. Whitman in many minds".

[65] The poem was not unanimously praised during this period: one critic wrote that "My Captain" was "more suitable for recitation before an enthusiastically uncritical audience than for its place in the Oxford Book of English Verse".

[68][51] In the 1997 book A Reader's Guide to Walt Whitman, scholar Gay Wilson Allen concluded that the poem's symbols were "trite", the rhythm "artificial", and the rhymes "erratic".

[23] Vendler writes that the poem utilizes elements of war journalism, such as "the bleeding drops of red" and "fallen cold and dead".

[72] Genoways considers the best "turn of phrase" in the poem to be line 12, where Whitman describes a "swaying mass", evocative of both a funeral and religious service.

[39] Vendler writes that the poem is told from the point of view of a young Union recruit, a "sailor-boy" who considers Lincoln like a "dear father".

[77] Cohen argues that the metaphor serves to "mask the violence of the Civil War" and project "that concealment onto the exulting crowds".

He concluded that the poem "abstracted the war into social affect and collective sentiment, converting public violence into a memory of shared loss by remaking history in the shape of a ballad".

[76][80] Following the 1995 assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, the poem was translated into Hebrew and put to music by Naomi Shemer.

[85] John Keating (played by Robin Williams), an English teacher at the Welton Academy boarding school,[86] introduces his students to the poem in their first class.

"[85] The use of "My Captain" in the film is considered "ironic" by UCLA literature professor Michael C. Cohen because the students are taking a stand against "repressive conformity" but using a poem intentionally written to be conventional.