The Sleepers (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Walt Whitman
- First Published: 1855
- Type of Work: Poem
- Genres: Poetry, Lyric poetry
- Subjects: Mothers, Parents and children, Traveling or travelers, Dreams, Spiritual life or spirituality, Death or dying, Shipwrecks, Beaches or seashores, Battles, Swimming or swimmers, Sleep, Night
“The Sleepers” has been called a surrealistic poem. Although it certainly possesses the disconnected incidents and imagery characteristic of dreams, however, it also has a discernible, tripartite structure that suggests a myth of initiation, death, and rebirth. In the first part, which consists of the first two sections, the persona wanders freely at night and sympathetically identifies with a wide variety of sleeping people; in part 2 (sections 3-6) the persona experiences vicariously the destructive and painful aspects of human experience; part 3 (sections 7-9) celebrates the...
[The entire page is 857 words long]
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