SOURCE: Bliss, Isabel St. John. “Young's Night Thoughts in Relation to Contemporary Christian Apologetics.” PMLA, 49 (March 1934): 37-70.

In the following essay, Bliss maintains that Young's poem is much more than just a piece about death, and should be considered an expression of Christian apologetics.

An understanding of the purposes and the popularity of Young's Night Thoughts is possible only through a realization of their relation to contemporary currents of thought. For the most part critics have confined their attention to the so-called personal element and the treatment of the theme of death, and have neglected perhaps the most outstanding feature of the Night Thoughts, the interest in Christian apologetics. Though the nine poems reveal a shift in emphasis and purpose—the first five, of 459, 694, 536, 842, and 1068 lines respectively, chiefly concerned with moral reflections on life and death, and the last four, of 819, 1480, 1417, and 2434 lines, almost wholly devoted to apologetics...