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    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The Journey"
    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The Journey"
    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The Journey"
    Ebook34 pages22 minutes

    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The Journey"

    By Gale and Cengage

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    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The 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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateSep 28, 2016
    ISBN9781535837644
    A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The Journey"

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      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Mary Oliver's "The Journey" - Gale

      12

      The Journey

      Mary Oliver

      1986

      Introduction

      The Journey by Mary Oliver appears in Dream Work, Oliver's sixth book of poetry. Typical of Oliver's style, the poem is a free verse lyric with multiple associations with the natural world. Its theme of self-preservation in the context of the chaotic modern world has resonated with readers worldwide, and it has been reprinted and quoted widely. Oliver stays true to her roots in romanticism with her use of everyday language and extensive metaphor to capture the emotional and psychological complexities of the human condition and explore the notion of feeling trapped by obligation and manipulation. Published in 1986, The Journey has remained on the lists of favorite poems in blogs, magazines, and books for the last twenty-five years.

      Author Biography

      Oliver was born on September 10, 1935, in Maple Heights, Ohio, on the outskirts of Cleveland. As a teenager, she visited the home of deceased poet Edna St. Vincent Millay in Austerlitz in upper New York State, eventually moving to the estate to help sort the work and correspondence Millay left behind and to serve as a companion for Millay's sister, Norma. It was there that she met photographer Molly Malone Cook, and the two entered into a romantic relationship that lasted over forty years until Cook's death in 2005. Oliver briefly attended both Ohio State University and Vassar College in the mid-1950s but never earned a degree.

      In 1963, at the age of twenty-eight, Oliver published her first collection of poetry, No Voyage, and Other Poems. A prolific writer, Oliver has since published more than twenty books of poetry and six books of prose, including books on the craft of poetry. Her 1983 poetry collection American Primitive won the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Dream Work, published in 1986, contains many of her best-loved poems, including The Journey. She

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