Celebrations Today – February 9

Holidays and observances

Christian feast day:
Earliest day on which Clean Monday can fall, while March 15 is the latest; celebrated on the first Monday of Great Lent. (Eastern Christianity)
Earliest day on which People’s Sunday can fall, while March 15 is the latest; celebrated on the first Sunday of Lent. (Malta)
St. Maroun’s Day (public holiday in Lebanon)

Celebrations Today – USA: February 9

National Bagel Day (Formerly Bagel and Lox Day)
National Pizza Day
National Toothache Day
National Bagel Day
National Develop Alternative Vices Day
National Pizza Pie Day
National Read in the Bathtub Day

Today in US History: February 9

O Captain! My Captain!

On February 9, 1888, Walt Whitman penned a note to the publishers of The Riverside Literature Series No. 32 calling attention to mistakes in their recently printed version of his poem, “O Captain! My Captain!” “Somehow you have got a couple of bad perversions in ‘O Captain,'” he wrote. “I send you a corrected sheet.”

Letter and Corrected Reprint
of Walt Whitman’s
“O Captain! My Captain!”, February 9, 1888.
Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division’s First 100 Years

Whitman wrote “O Captain! My Captain!” in response to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in 1865. He revised the poem in 1866 and again in 1871. Apparently, the Riverside editors published an earlier version of the poem. Whitman’s February 9 letter to the publishers details his changes for punctuation and entire lines of text.

Published to immediate acclaim in the Saturday Press, “O Captain! My Captain!” was the only poem from Whitman’s compendium, Leaves of Grass, widely reprinted and anthologized during his lifetime. Whitman rarely used rhymed, rhythmically regular verse, but here it creates a somber, yet exalted, effect.

O CAPTAIN! my captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weathered 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! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red!
Where on the deck my captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

By the 1880s, Whitman was asked to recite the poem so often he said, “I’m almost sorry I ever wrote [it],” though it had “certain emotional immediate reasons for being.”

Abraham Lincoln,
Douglas Volk, artist,
photograph of a painting,
circa 1908-12.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

Walt Whitman,
John White Alexander, artist,
photograph of a painting,
circa 1900-20.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

An outpouring of communal grief and numerous efforts to memorialize the fallen leader followed Lincoln’s death. In May 1865, African-American citizens of the District of Columbia organized the Educational Monument Associationto the Memory of Abraham Lincoln for the purpose of erecting a national monument to Lincoln. African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907 contains the complete text of the group’s constitution as well as the eloquent tribute that Frederick Douglass made to Lincoln at the 1876 unveiling of the Lincoln Monument in Lincoln Park, Washington, D. C.

The Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana includes more than 200 sheet-music compositions that represent Lincoln and the war as reflected in popular music. The collection spans the years from Lincoln’s presidential campaign in 1859 through the 1909 centennial of Lincoln’s birth. The compiler, Alfred Whital Stern (1881-1960), is considered the greatest private collector of materials relating to the life and times of Abraham Lincoln. Search the collection on death to find plaintive tunes such as “Rest, Noble Chieftain” in which the composer extols, “Rest noble Chieftain, sweet be thy sleep And over thy grave a Nation shall weep….”
For more on Abraham Lincoln, visit Mr. Lincoln’s Virtual Library. Highlighting the Emancipation Proclamation and Lincoln assasination, it presents the wealth of Lincoln materials held at the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress houses the largest archival collection of Walt Whitman materials in the world, and has created a number of online features related to the poet. Browse Walt Whitman: Online Resources at the Library of Congress to find these resources, which include digitized versions of four Whitman notebooks.
Whitman wrote another elegy for Lincoln entitled “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d.” In 2005, the Library featured a reading of the poem to mark the sesquicentennial of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass. This poem is just one of a number of many published in the various editions of Leaves of Grass now available online.