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Alienation in Poetry

Alienation in Poetry

This Halloween, write about the scariest thing: estrangement.

Sean Glatch
October 22, 2025

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Freewrite
Poem: “Night Walk” by Franz Wright
Divinations
Prompt
Archive

Freewrite

What do you feel exiled from?

In what ways do you feel at odds with modern life?

What are some sources of alienation for you—personally, interpersonally, or at a societal level?

Freewrite your responses to these questions. Document what arises in the mind.

Poem: “Night Walk” by Franz Wright

Retrieved here.

The all-night convenience store’s empty
and no one is behind the counter.
You open and shut the glass door a few times
causing a bell to go off,
but no one appears. You only came
to buy a pack of cigarettes, maybe
a copy of yesterday’s newspaper—
finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.
It is freezing, but it is a good thing
to step outside again:
you can feel less alone in the night,
with lights on here and there
between the dark buildings and trees.
Your own among them, somewhere.
There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,
to sit you down and tell you
what has happened to their lives.
And the night smells like snow.
Walking home for a moment
you almost believe you could start again.
And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

Divinations

This lonesome, alienated poem is Franz Wright as his best: stark, jarring line breaks and sudden images; the strangeness of urban life. If you like this poem, you might also like Wright's poem "Heaven," which we have a prompt for involving phanopoeia.

A few craft elements worth noting are:

The use of second-person point of view ("you"), which makes the poem's subject intimate to our experiences yet also alienates us readers from the speaker.
The poem's line breaks, which so often create multiplicities, dualities, and tensions in the work.
That ending, woof!

I think that the second person is hard to write with in poetry. What it wants to do is make a poem's experience feel like my own, but, imperfectly written, second-person poems might implant images in my mind without imparting experiences I can relate to.

I don't feel that way here. I've never bought cigarettes from a convenience store, but I do know what a snow-scented night smells like, or how it feels to wander winter-dark streets. What's imparted through "you" is a feeling: not concrete experiences, but the overall sensation of being surrounded by people and lonely.

Amplifying this effect are the poem's line breaks. Here are some that really knock my teeth out:

Double meanings:

finally you take one and leave
thirty-five cents in its place.

That first line makes it seem like "you" leave the store without paying, but the second line has you pay—but paying nobody, leaving the store as empty as you found it.

There must be thousands of people
in this city who are dying
to welcome you into their small bolted rooms,

I love how these line breaks evolve the poem's meaning. Line 1: Yes, there must be thousands of people! Line 2: Yes, those thousands of people must also be on their death beds! Line 3: Oh! There are also thousands of people who want to welcome me! Emotional whiplash, to say the least, but the multiplicities of a city are contained in each of these lines' truths and possibilities.

Tension and opposition:

It is freezing, but it is a good thing

This line holds two contradictory ideas together in an interesting way. You would expect them to sit in different lines, or perhaps for the line to be broken before "but."

And an intense love rushes to your heart,
and hope. It’s unendurable, unendurable.

the line breaking “love” and “hope” cements these two forces as different, somehow. It also places “hope” in closest proximity to “unendurable.”

That final line really sticks the landing. It's abstract, but built upon the concrete images and tangible experience related to the reader throughout the poem. It also, I think, exemplifies the big city loneliness that the speaker feels: that so many people and possibilities surround us in places where we are so often alone. Hope drives you, tethers you, and also torments you with possibility—to restart your life; to find people; to not be so alienated.

What is Alienation in Poetry?

From the Modernists onwards, alienation is a prevalent theme in 20th and 21st century poetry.

Alienation isn't unique to these centuries, but the events of the past 125+ years have certainly resulted in an increased sense of personal and cultural isolation. World wars, genocides, the atom bomb, and the televising of these calamities threatens our sense of shared humanity; new technologies isolate us and alienate us from the planet we share; the planet is burning; our need grows teeth; where is God in all of this, or was He never there?

Such sentiments recur particularly throughout Modernism, which saw the likes of T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland" and, arguably, Sylvia Plath's "Mad Girl's Love Song".

Franz Wright's "Night Walk" was published in his 2006 collection God's Silence. I don't know that it readily camps with either Modernism or its successor, Postmodernism, but that's besides the point. What Wright is able to do is capture the endurance of alienation in our world, one in which our humanity is in constant negotiation with strange and overwhelming realities.

Prompt

Alienation can mean many things, but it is always a sense of separation. From what? From society, from tangible reality, from the Earth, from God, from other people, from even our own selves.

Write a poem that contends with alienation—the ways in which you feel modern life drives a wedge between the self and what surrounds it. Impart that sense of alienation through the poem's attention to form and language.