Everything about Confessionalism Poetry totally explained
Confessional poetry traffics in intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about illness, sexuality, despondence. The confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the
1950s and
1960s.
John Berryman,
Allen Ginsberg,
Robert Lowell,
Sylvia Plath,
Theodore Roethke,
Anne Sexton, and
William De Witt Snodgrass have all been called 'Confessional Poets'. As fresh and different as the work of these poets appeared at the time, it's also true that several poets prominent in the canon of Western literature, perhaps most notably
Sextus Propertius and
Petrarch, could easily share the label of "confessional" with the confessional poets of the fifties and sixties.
Development of definition
In
1959 M. L. Rosenthal first used the term "confessional" in a review of Robert Lowell's
Life Studies entitled '
Poetry as Confession', Rosenthal mentions earlier tendencies towards the confessional but notes how there was typically a 'mask' which hid the poet's 'actual face'. "Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it's hard not to think of
Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal."
Life Studies broke new ground: the reviewer in
The Kenyon Review saw clearly what new thing had been achieved: "For these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest: what they've won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry." Nevertheless there were clear moves towards the confessional mode before the publication of
Life Studies.
Delmore Schwartz's
Genesis had been published in
1943, and
John Berryman has written his
Sonnets to Chris in
1947, although they were not to be published until
1967 (and then as
Berryman's Sonnets). Berryman's
sonnet sequence fits in the long tradition of highly personal sonnet sequences, stretching back through
George Meredith's
Modern Love to
William Shakespeare's
sonnets and the sonnets of
Petrarch. The difference between the long tradition of intimate, personal, lyrical poetry and the confessional approach, lies in the shameful confidences that Rosenthal identified, it goes "beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment". In his
1955 poem
Howl,
Allen Ginsberg wrote "[To] stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head,..."
The impetus towards more personal, more autobiographical writing, dates back at least a century and a half before
Life Studies. In February
1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in a letter to
Thomas Poole: "I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book — let him relate the events of his own life with honesty — not disguising the feelings that accompanied them."
Constructed self
In a letter to
The Guardian on 20 April
1989,
Ted Hughes wrote that there was a "Fantasia about Sylvia Plath".. Plath's life and poetry have been constructed in such a way as to perpetuate particular fictions about her marriage, mental illness, and "autobiographic" writing, and although this may in part be due to a mythologizing tendency among critics and biographers, it can be shown how Plath fictionalizes herself in her writing.
Later writers such as
Denise Levertov,
Adrienne Rich, and
Audre Lorde present personal difficulties in a socio-political context. For example, Lorde's poem, "Coal" reflects on such personal problems within a given cultural context. Levertov's "Life at War" presents something inextricably personal bound in the conflict of the age.
What defines poetry as confessional isn't the subject matter, but how the issue represented is explored. Confessional poetry explores personal details about the authors' life without meekness, modesty, or discretion. Because of this, confessional poetry is a popular form of creative writing that many people enjoy not only to read but to embark upon. Another element that's specific to this poetry is self-revelation achieved through creating the poem. This passes on to the reader, and a connection is made.
Reasons behind writing confessional poetry
Poets whose writing is classified as confessional (it has been argued) use writing as an outlet for their demons. Writing and then re-reading one's work changes the cognitive processes with which one's brain processes this information—it offers perspective. Anne Sexton famously said, "Poetry led me by the hand out of madness." But she also argued against this perception in her interviews. In an interview with Patricia Marx, Sexton denies that writing "cured her":
» "I don’t think [thatwriting cured my mental illness] particularly. It certainly didn't create mental health. It isn’t as simple as my poetry makes it, because I simplified everything to make it more dramatic. I've written poems in a mental institution, but only later, not at the beginning."
Reaction
Confessional free verse poetry seemed to have become the dominant approach in late 20th-century American poetry.
Robert Bly in the preface to his 1983 translation of
Antonio Machado's poetry,
Times Alone, praised Machado for "his emphasis on the suffering of others rather than his own". The reaction to confessional poetry has sparked new movements such as that of the
Language poets and
New Formalism.
Further Information
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