A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "Night Journey"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Theodore Roethke's "Night Journey," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Poetry for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Poetry for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Sep 28, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535829557

Book preview

12

Night Journey

Theodore Roethke

1941

Introduction

Night Journey, written by American poet Theodore Roethke, was published in 1941 in the author's first collection of poems Open House. The poem is representative of the early phase of Roethke's career, when he favored traditional poetic forms. Night Journey, written in short lines, each with three metrical feet and with an irregular rhyme scheme, details the author's journey on a train through the night, apparently as he travels back to his native Michigan. During the journey, he spots bridges, trees, mists, a lake, a mountain pass, and other features of the landscape. It is often that Roethke's poems represent his efforts to pit himself against the void or the abyss. In many respects, his poetry is the cry of a lone voice trying to find meaning and purpose in the face of nothingness. Although that impulse becomes more apparent in his later poems, the image in Night Journey of a single voice hurtling through a nighttime landscape suggests Roethke's principal poetic vision.

Roethke's reputation as a poet has grown steadily since the publication of Open House, and he is now regarded as one of the major American poets of the twentieth century, valued because his poetry consistently relies on fresh, vivid, and relatively simple language. A later collection, The Waking Poems, 1933–1953, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1954. Later still, he won the Bollingen Prize and the Edna St. Vincent Millay Prize, and after his death in 1963, his collection The Far Field won the National Book Award for 1965. Roethke combined his career as a poet with that of a college teacher, and he achieved success despite recurring bouts of mental