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A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry
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Confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or “I.” This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell , Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton , and W. D. Snodgrass . Lowell’s book, Life Studies, was a highly personal account of his life and familial ties and had a significant impact on American poetry. Plath and Sexton were both students of Lowell and noted that his work influenced their own writing.
The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry. Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression, and relationships were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner. Sexton, in particular, was interested in the psychological aspect of poetry, having started writing at the suggestion of her therapist.
The confessional poets were not merely recording their emotions on paper; craft and construction were extremely important to their work. While their treatment of the poetic self may have been groundbreaking and shocking to some readers, these poets maintained a high level of craftsmanship through their careful attention to and use of prosody.
One of the most well-known poems by a confessional poet is “ Daddy ” by Plath. Addressed to her father, the poem contains references to the Holocaust but uses a sing-song rhythm that echoes the nursery rhymes of childhood:
Daddy, I have had to kill you. You died before I had time— Marble-heavy, a bag full of God, Ghastly statue with one gray toe Big as a Frisco seal
Another confessional poet of this generation was John Berryman . His major work was The Dream Songs, which consists of 385 poems about a character named Henry and his friend Mr. Bones. Many of the poems contain elements of Berryman's own life and traumas, such as his father’s suicide. Below is an excerpt from “ Dream Song 1 ”:
All the world like a woolen lover once did seem on Henry’s side. Then came a departure. Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought. I don’t see how Henry, pried open for all the world to see, survived.
The confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s pioneered a type of writing that forever changed the landscape of American poetry. The tradition of confessional poetry has been a major influence on generations of writers and continues to this day; Marie Howe and Sharon Olds are two contemporary poets whose writing largely draws upon their personal experience.
browse poets from this movement
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The Poetry of I: Crash Course on Confessional Poetry
What’s happening in the late 1950s-60s.
Amid such cultural revelations as the Hula Hoop, LEGOs, color television, and Hitchcock’s Psycho , the Confessional poets were pioneering a new writing style during a time of change. From the Civil Rights Movement and Martin Luther King’s famous “I Have a Dream” Speech, to the first televised Presidential debates, big movements were afoot in America. The image of the American family and the American Dream was also undergoing a radical change with the first waves of counterculture.
Robert Lowell
- Now considered a founding member of the Confessional movement, Lowell started out as a rigorously formal poet exploring religion and politics. His personal life was full of emotional turmoil, and this played into his transition from traditional poetry to the more free-form poetry of personal experience. The result was his collection Life Studies (1959), an extraordinary book that changed modern poetry and paved the way for the younger Confessional poets.
Sylvia Plath
- Arguably the most famous Confessional poet, Plath actively wrote and published poetry in her youth, achieved academic excellence in her college years, and accepted a Fulbright Scholarship in Cambridge after graduation. After studying with Robert Lowell, her first collection, Colossus , was published. Her most famous collection, Ariel soon followed. She was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Distinguished from her fellows for her intense imagery alongside her musicality, Plath’s vivid and memorable work still captivates and enthralls.
Anne Sexton
- Like most Confessional poets, Sexton’s poems offer a window into her emotional pain—and, like most Confessional poets, Sexton suffered from a history of mental illness. At the suggestion of her doctor, she channeled her experience and began writing poetry, going on to win the Pulitzer Prize for her collection Live or Die (1967). Her womanhood was a central theme in her poetry, and in a time when topics like menstruation, abortion, and addiction were considered private topics, Sexton addressed them head on.
D. Snodgrass
- Snodgrass published his first collection of poetry, Heart ’ s Needle , in 1959, and won the Pulitzer Prize the year after. He has since published numerous volumes of poetry. Often credited as one of the founders of the Confessional movement, he does not consider his poems a part of the movement, although his work matches thematically. He, like Plath, also studied under Robert Lowell.
John Berryman
- Berryman is a technically gifted poet who, like Lowell, got his start in the poetic conventions of the time. Later in life, he won acclaim as an innovator, culminating in his famous Pulitzer Prize winning collection 77 Dream Songs (1964). By 1969, he had added to this collection of almost four hundred sonnet-like poems in this sequence that was renamed The Dream Songs .
The Fundamentals:
Poetry of persona:, vivid self-revelations:, imagery laid bare:, the reading list:, “ skunk hour ” by robert lowell.
“I myself am hell;
nobody ’s here—
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes ’ red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.”
“ Lady Lazarus ” by Sylvia Plath
“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.”
“ The Truth the Dead Know ” by Anne Sexton
“My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely.”
“ April Inventory ” by W.D. Snodgrass
“I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.”
“ Dream Song 14 ” by John Berryman
“After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn …”
Lasting Effects:
The confessional poets changed the landscape of modern American poetry. In fact, the widely held view of poetry as “confession”—baring your soul, exposing truth or emotions, etc.—stems from this movement’s perspective shift. Essentially, the confessional poets asserted that all angles of the human experience are worthy poetic material. The poetry of “I” still reigns today.
- http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/brief-guide-confessional-poetry
- http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/confessional%20poetry
- http://www.oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095631501
-Alexandria Petrassi
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Confessional
Confessional Poetry began as one of many artistic movements in post-war twentieth-century America. Its most fundamental aspect is blatant autobiographical content, which often manifests as self-deprecation. It frequently deals with taboo topics such as sex, addiction, mental health and familial relationships. A Confessional Poet’s emotional authenticity draws on personal experiences and real situations, giving “negative” emotions—fear, anger, sadness, impotence—the attention and artistic relevance traditionally reserved for “positive” emotions. Where sonnets are often associated with love, and epics ultimately celebrate strength, Confessional Poetry exposes and intimately handles private, human pains.
Critic M. L. Rosenthal coined the term “Confessional Poetry” in reviewing Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, published in 1959. The term has since been applied to the works of several poets, primarily Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and W. D. Snodgrass. In these four cases, the poets knew each other personally, and some critics argue that their works had common characteristics. However, the Confessional Poetry movement has never formed a cohesive group. Critical debate continues over who can and cannot be considered a “Confessional Poet.” Some argue that Plath does not fit in this category, and Snodgrass rejected the label outright. Though the designation of “Confessional Poet” is rare, the writing of Confessional Poetry continues today.
School of Poetry - poets
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ver since Walt Whitman, our great father of American poetry, wrote the opening line for "Song of Myself" ÷ "I celebrate myself, and sing myself" ÷ a spotlight has shone on the American poet's ego, and the expression of his or her individual self, as a primary source for information, as well as inspiration. Indeed, this focus on the self has often been consciously proposed and promoted by the poets themselves. However, even when American poets have not purposely placed themselves in the forefront of their poems, many readers have repeatedly sought to identify the personae and performances reported in the poetry with the biographical details belonging to the lives of the poets behind the lines. by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, along with other "English Romantics were encouraged to base poems on personal experience by John Locke's notion that each individual's consciousness is uniquely formed." In doing so, many contemporary poets have managed to write poems of personal experience while at the same time avoiding the criticism confessional poets like Lowell, Plath, and Sexton received for their most unrelentingly intimate works resembling scenes from a private documentary, even from sympathetic readers like Elizabeth Bishop, who confided to her friend Robert Lowell that she deplored some of the confessional elements in his poetry, especially what she perceived as Lowell's unethical use of confidential material from personal letters and conversations with family and friends. took it home, drew a bath, eased into the tub, and began to read. 'I was afraid I'd be electrocuted,' said Sholl. 'There was all this current. I had never heard metaphors, similes, buzzing like that.'"
represent an important and impressive touchstone, setting a standard by which future discussions on this topic, of which there should be many, will be measured. Saint Paul, Minnesota: Graywolf Press, 2001. ISBN 1-55597-355-8 $17.95 |
Poems & Poets
Glossary of Poetic Terms
Confessional poetry.
Vividly self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Lowell , W.D. Snodgrass , Sylvia Plath , Anne Sexton , and John Berryman . The term was first used by M.L. Rosenthal in a 1959 review of Life Studies , the collection in which Robert Lowell revealed his struggles with mental illness and a troubled marriage. Read an interview with Snodgrass in which he addresses his work and the work of others associated with confessionalism. Browse more poets who wrote confessional poems .
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- > The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945
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Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945
- Series page
- Copyright page
- Notes on Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Chronology of Publications and Events
- 1 Periodizing Poetic Practice since 1945
- 2 From the Late Modernism of the “Objectivists” to the Proto-postmodernism of “Projective Verse”
- 3 Confessional Poetry
- 4 Surrealism as a Living Modernism:
- 5 The San Francisco Renaissance
- 6 Three Generations of Beat Poetics
- 7 The Poetics of Chant and Inner/Outer Space:
- 8 Feminist Poetries
- 9 Ecopoetries in America
- 10 Language Writing
- 11 American Poetry and Its Institutions
- 12 The Contemporary “Mainstream” Lyric
- 13 Poems in and out of School:
- 14 Rap, Hip Hop, Spoken Word
- 15 Poetry of the Twenty-First Century:
3 - Confessional Poetry
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
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- Confessional Poetry
- By Deborah Nelson
- Edited by Jennifer Ashton , University of Illinois, Chicago
- Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945
- Online publication: 05 January 2013
- Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139032674.004
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COMMENTS
Confessional poetry is the poetry of the personal or “I.” This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass.
Confessional poetry or "Confessionalism" is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the late 1950s and early 1960s. [1] It is sometimes classified as a form of Postmodernism. [2] It has been described as poetry of the personal or "I", focusing on extreme moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma ...
Confessional poets wrote in direct, colloquial speech rhythms and used images that reflected intense psychological experiences, often culled from childhood or battles with mental illness or breakdown. They tended to utilize sequences, emphasizing connections between poems.
The confessional poets changed the landscape of modern American poetry. In fact, the widely held view of poetry as “confession”—baring your soul, exposing truth or emotions, etc.—stems from this movement’s perspective shift.
Where sonnets are often associated with love, and epics ultimately celebrate strength, Confessional Poetry exposes and intimately handles private, human pains. Critic M. L. Rosenthal coined the term “Confessional Poetry” in reviewing Robert Lowell’s Life Studies, published in 1959.
In his essay establishing the term "confessional" for this new movement of mid-twentieth century poets, Rosenthal recognized a further willingness by American poets to open their own personal faults and frailties, their most private histories and intimate experiences, for close examination by the readers of their poetry.
Confessional poetry is, at its essence, the spilling of one’s true self onto a page. It removes the mask that the author may otherwise wear and exposes who they are in a raw and authentic way through colloquial language and approachable writing methods.
Confessional poetry. Vividly self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman.
Was confessionalism an important movement in American poetry, a significant break from New Critical and modernist models? Or was it simply a convenient, and ultimately reductive, critical label used to explain certain developments in postwar poetry?
Confessional Poetry; By Deborah Nelson; Edited by Jennifer Ashton, University of Illinois, Chicago; Book: The Cambridge Companion to American Poetry since 1945; Online publication: 05 January 2013; Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CCO9781139032674.004