</titleStmt> <publicationStmt> <p/> </publicationStmt> <sourceDesc> <p/> </sourceDesc> </fileDesc> <profileDesc> <ge:geneticGrp> <ge:geneticNote type="thematic"> <linkGrp> <link targets="#poem #sweet_flag"/> </linkGrp> <p>Groups the witnesses that contains ideas and suggestions that may have a connection to the poem</p> </ge:geneticNote> </ge:geneticGrp> </profileDesc> </teiHeader> <TEI> <teiHeader> <fileDesc> <titleStmt> <title>Genetic Relations between the Witnesses

Demonstration

Never.

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 Relates witnesses that share themes and topic Relates witnesses that are connected from a evolutionary point of view

Tracing the development of the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers" involves over 100 images of both handwritten and printed material produced across a 30-year period.

Notes for a poem about night "visions," possibly related to the untitled 1855 poem that Whitman eventually titled "The Sleepers."

In this early manuscript, Whitman's lists contain ideas related to both "Song of Myself" and "The Sleepers."

An early manuscript draft of the "Lucifer" section of the poem that likely lead to the 1855 printed version.

The second notebook, "No doubt the efflux of the soul," is a longer one (24 leaves) that lays out the philosophical ideas that generate the poem and produces some of the key images in the first section of the poem ("Cache! And Cache again! All over the earth, and in the heavens that swathe the earth, and in the waters of the sea.—They do their jobs well; those journeymen divine. Only from the Poet they can hide nothing and would not if they could"). The key point here is that Whitman was generating different parts of his poem in at least three different notebooks—working out in one notebook the imagery in trial poetic lines, and working out in the other two the main ideas in prose.

A manuscript containing approximately seven lines, lightly revised, of the poem eventually titled "The Sleepers."