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Whitman's The Sleepers.(Walt Whitman's poem)

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From: The Explicator
Date: 20050101
Author:Cox, Michael W.

Walt Whitman's "The Sleepers" is an eight-part poem that uses an omniscient speaker to examine the lives of the sleeping and the dead. As the speaker says, "I dream in my dream all the dreams of the other dreamers, / And I become the other dreamers" (lines 30-31). In the four narrative sections of the poem (sections 3-6), the speaker--the powerful first-person presence of the poem's four-section frame who seems so Whitmanesque, so taken with reading himself into (and seeing himself reflected by) everyone and everything--recedes into the background, or more precisely, into a ...

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