Parts of the analysis of "The Sleepers" in this site are reproduced from Ed Folsom's "Lucifer and Ethiopia: Whitman, Race, and Poetics before the Civil War and After," in David Reynolds, ed., A Historical Approach to Walt Whitman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 45-95, and are used here with the permission of Oxford University Press. Other works referred to in the site follow.

Allen, Gay Wilson. The New Walt Whitman Handbook. New York: New York Univeristy Press, 1975.

Allen, Gay Wilson, and Charles T. Davis, eds. Walt Whitman's Poems. New York: Grove Press, 1955.

Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1980. [See pp. 175-179 for a reading of "The Sleepers" in relation to nineteenth-century notions of clairvoyance.]

Beach, Christopher. The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth-Century America. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Black, Stephen A. Whitman's Journeys into Chaos. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975. [See pp. 125-137 for a psychological reading of "The Sleepers."]

Carlisle, E. Fred. The Uncertain Self: Whitman's Drama of Identity. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1973. [See pp. 165-170 for a reading of "The Sleepers."]

Cavitch, David. My Soul and I: The Inner Life of Walt Whitman. Boston: Beacon, 1985. [See pp. 74-81 for a psycho-biographical reading of "The Sleepers."]

Chase, Richard. Walt Whitman Reconsidered. London: Gollancz, 1955. [See pp. 54-57 for a reading of "The Sleepers."]

Erkkila, Betsy. Whitman the Political Poet. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. [See pp. 118-124 for a political-historical reading of "The Sleepers," emphasizing race.]

Fone, Byrne R. S. Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992. [See pp. 117-129 for a gay reading of "The Sleepers."]

Hutchinson, George B. The Ecstatic Whitman. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1986. [See pp. 59-67 for a reading of "The Sleepers" in relation to theories of shamanism.]

Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989. [See pp. 15-27 for a reading of "The Sleepers" in relation to nineteenth-century attitudes about sexuality.]

Larson, Kerry C. Whitman's Drama of Consensus. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988. [See pp. 56-74 for a reading of 'The Sleepers' in relation to political theory.]

Loving, Jerome. "The One Book for Whitman Study." Études Anglaises 45 (July-September 1992), 333-339.

Marki, Ivan. The Trial of the Poet. New York: Columbia University Press, 1976. [See pp. 235-239 for a reading of "The Sleepers" in the context of the first edition of Leaves of Grass.]

Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1979.

Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. New York: New York University Press, 1968. [See pp. 66-84 for a psychological reading of "The Sleepers."]

Miller, Jr., James E. A Critical Guide to Leaves of Grass. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957. [See pp. 130-141 for a reading of "The Sleepers."]

Schyberg, Frederik. Walt Whitman. New York: Columbia University Press, 1951. [See pp. 124-126 for a reading of "The Sleepers."]

Warren, James Perrin. Walt Whitman's Language Experiment. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990. [See pp. 74-93 for a reading of "The Sleepers" in relation to Whitman's ideas of a "new grammar" and in relation to notebook drafts of parts of the poem.]

Whitman, Walt. Daybooks and Notebooks, ed. William White. 3 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1977. Abbreviated DBN.

Whitman, Walt. Leaves of Grass, Comprehensive Reader's Edition, ed. Sculley Bradley and Harold W. Blodgett. New York: New York University Press, 1965. Abbreviated LGC.

Whitman, Walt. Notebooks and Unpublished Prose Manuscripts, ed. Edward F. Grier. 6 vols. New York: New York University Press, 1984. Abbreviated NUPM.

Whitman, Walt. The Uncollected Poetry and Prose of Walt Whitman, ed. Emory Holloway. 2 vols. New York: Doubleday, 1921.

Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of the Poet. New York: Basic Books, 1984. [See pp. 245-248 for a reading of "The Sleepers."]

OTHER RECOMMENDED RECENT ESSAYS DEALING WITH "THE SLEEPERS":

Gray, Eric R. "Sexual Anxiety and Whitman's 'O Hot-Cheeked and Blushing.'" ATQ 12 (March 1998), 5-26. [Offers a Freudian reading of the "hot-cheeked" dream of exposure and embarrassment in "The Sleepers" (a passage Whitman deleted in the 1881 version of the poem), viewing it as "about sexual anxiety" where "the speaker regresses; the speaker feels post-coital guilt after having sexual contact with a mother-figure, makes an unsuccessful attempt to identify with an imposing father-figure, and finally retreats in desperation to the mother's ambivalent breast and eventually in the following section to her death-like womb."]

Beach, Christopher. "'Now Lucifer was not dead': Slavery, Intertextuality, and Subjectivity in Leaves of Grass." Canadian Review of American Studies 25 (Spring 1995), 27-48. [Offers close readings of "I Sing the Body Electric" and Section 6 of "The Sleepers," emphasizing "their larger historical and political discursive contexts" (especially discourses of slavery and race) and demonstrating how these poems "engage in a dialogue with works by American writers such as Longfellow, Whittier, and Herman Melville." In different form, this essay can be found in Beach's The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth-Century America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1996).]

New, Elisa. The Regenerate Lyric: Theology and Innovation in American Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. [Chapter 4, "Crossing Leviticus: Whitman," 95-150, focuses on "The Sleepers" and argues against the "mainstream consensus" of an "Emersonian Whitman": "If 'Song of Myself' is justly called Whitman's Genesis, Emersonian in its drive toward aboriginal beginnings, 'The Sleepers' is his Leviticus and Deuteronomy."]

Whelan, Carol Zapata. "'Do I Contradict Myself?': Progression through Contraries in Walt Whitman's 'The Sleepers.'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 10 (Summer 1992), 25-39. [Employs Julia Kristeva's theories to read Whitman's "The Sleepers" as a progression through dichotomies which justifies the "life affirming" final two sections that other critics have regarded as "contrived."]

French, R. W. "Whitman's Dream Vision: A Reading of 'The Sleepers.'" Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 8 (Summer 1990), 1-15. [Offers a coherent extended reading of the poem as a complex dream.]

CRITICAL VIEWS

HOME