In Popular Culture
The 1989 film Dead Poets Society also makes repeated references to the poem, especially when English teacher John Keating (Robin Williams) tells his students that they may call him "O Captain! My Captain!" if they feel daring. At the end of the film, the students show their support to the recently-dismissed Keating in defiance against the school's headmaster, by calling the phrase in the classroom.
In the 1996 science fiction novel The Truth Machine, the protagonist places a back door in the book's otherwise infallible lie detector that allows him to avoid detection when he repeats fragments of the poem in his mind.
In referencing a scene from Dead Poets Society, the phrase was used in A Nutcracker in Paradise episode of television comedy-drama Bunheads. It has also been used in such shows as Archer, How I Met Your Mother, Parks and Recreation, Family Guy, South Park, the BBC show Bad Education, and the video game Mass Effect.
Read more about this topic: O Captain! My Captain!
Famous quotes containing the words popular and/or culture:
“The poet needs a ground in popular tradition on which he may work, and which, again, may restrain his art within the due temperance. It holds him to the people, supplies a foundation for his edifice; and, in furnishing so much work done to his hand, leaves him at leisure, and in full strength for the audacities of his imagination.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Insolent youth rides, now, in the whirlwind. For those modern iconoclasts who are without culture possess, apparently, all the courage.”
—Ellen Glasgow (1873–1945)