Confessional Poets
Confessional poets are a group of mid-20th century poets known for their autobiographical and deeply personal writing style. They often explored themes of mental illness, trauma, and personal struggles in their work, blurring the lines between the self and the art. Notable confessional poets include Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell.
5 Key excerpts on "Confessional Poets"
eBook - ePubModern Confessional Writing
New Critical Essays
- Jo Gill, Jo Gill(Authors)
- 2006(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Rosenthal introduced it in a review of Lowell’s Life Studies in 1959, its definition and its usefulness have been much debated. Nevertheless the name has stuck, because it seems to capture something important about the poetry. To begin with a brief definition: confessional poetry draws on the poet’s autobiography and is usually set in the first person. It makes a claim to forego personae and to represent an account of the poet’s own feelings and circumstances, often by reference to names and scenarios linked to the poet. The work dwells on experiences generally prohibited expression by social convention: mental illness, intra-familial conflicts and resentments, childhood traumas, sexual transgressions and intimate feelings about one’s body are its frequent concerns. The transgression involved in naming the forbidden gives rise to the term ‘confession’, which, via its religious, psychoanalytic and legal associations, summons up ideas of sin, mental breakdown and criminality. The shock value inherent in such links plays an important part in the operation of this poetry, but defenders of the work have objected that the term focuses attention on these elements and obscures the poets’ artistry and more subtle effects. Objections have also been made to the term’s suggestion of an identity between poet and speaker – its perceived implication that the poet ‘confesses’ in the poems as s/he might to a priest or doctor. Clearly, though based on elements of the poet’s life, such work cannot be restricted to literal retellings of events or ‘true’ emotions. As recent studies in autobiography confirm, some transformation must occur in the process of rendering any set of facts into narrative, poetic or not. Indeed, confession’s reality claim is an extremely artful manipulation of the materials of poetry, not a departure from them...
eBook - ePub- David McCooey, Maria Takolander(Authors)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...They also comply with the cultural expectations of confession (religious and psychoanalytic) in conveying intimacy and, by offering their private selves for public consumption, conscientiously embrace the frisson of transgression. Nevertheless, confessional poems, as Lerner puts it, have ‘an aesthetic reason’ for being written (66). They are composed from a rich, institutionally acquired knowledge of the domain, and often in direct response to the work of fellow poets in the confessional school. 7 The poetry is also motivated by professional ambition for success and recognition from the gatekeepers in their domain – for publication and acclaim, and even monetary reward. As Hughes poetically confesses of his and Plath’s use of life in their work as young poets, ‘we still weren’t sure we wanted to own / Anything. Mainly we were hungry / To convert everything to profit’ (1125). 8 Such points are all germane to a theory of creativity that shifts the emphasis from individual psychology to what Glăveneau calls ‘cultural psychology’ (Distributed Creativity 8) – from a ‘He-paradigm’ or masculine ‘paradigm of … the exceptional creator’ (7) to a ‘We-paradigm’ (8), which understands creativity as a ‘ distributed, dynamic, socio-cultural and developmental phenomenon ’ (2, original emphasis). However, what I want to bring into focus here is how every creative act is also shaped by its materials, drawing attention to how the self that materialises through the autobiographical artefact is always other than itself. In what follows, I examine how confessional poetry emerges as a result of the writer making ‘a more or less conscious decision to share agency with the object and follow its lead at different moments within the process’ (Glăveneau Distributed Creativity 60, original emphasis)...
eBook - ePubVise and Shadow
Essays on the Lyric Imagination, Poetry, Art, and Culture
- Peter Balakian(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
...Trauma, then, for the confessional mode was simultaneously historical, political, and personal. By the 1960s, the new orientation toward the personal-familial, confessional-intimate, vernacular, taboo-breaking voices were dominant, including Amiri Baraka, James Dickey, James Wright, Robert Bly, Richard Hugo, Ashbery, James Schulyer, O’Hara, and Denise Levertov. Lowell put it well when he noted of his own career swerve of the 1950s that his early poems written under the influence of Eliotic modernism now seemed to him “stiff, humorless, impenetrable. . . prehistoric monsters dragged down into the bog and death by their own ponderous armor.” 4 He felt his poems had become “purely a craft,” and there “needed to be some breakthrough back into life.” However, this sense of breakthrough into life (however complex and layered that notion might be) that was defining the new confessionalism had already gurgled up in Roethke’s book The Lost Son and Other Poems, published in 1948 before “confessionalism” had been branded as an aesthetic orientation for a new era. In his groundbreaking book, Roethke’s particular brew of Freudian and Jungian forces was essential to the shape of both the greenhouse poems and the longer five-section poem “The Lost Son,” the first of thirteen poems that would make up the long poem cycle Praise to the End...
eBook - ePub- Gillian White(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Harvard University Press(Publisher)
...Thus, the early promise and excitement of the “personal” for those poets who got identified as “Confessional” was in imagining that poetry could attest to aspects of experience theretofore counted out by such universalizing assumptions. Though the impersonal poetics of Eliot and the New Critics figured the successful lyric poem as a work seemingly undertaken as if with no concern for audience, drawing on Mill’s mid-nineteenth-century idea that poetry at its lyric best was “feeling confessing itself to itself” in “utter unconsciousness of a listener,” Confessionals turned their back on listeners by ignoring standards of decorum. 13 Indeed, the presumption implicit in Mill—that this intensely lyric, inward poetry would nevertheless be perfectly legible to anyone who happened upon it—is to assume that nothing in the poem would prove so particular to the poet’s experience or so countercultural or so peculiarly put as to thwart the reader’s identification with the poem and the subject in it. For Mill, poetry is “the delineation of the deeper and more secret workings of human emotion” and thus “interesting only to those to whom it recalls what they have felt, or whose imagination it stirs up to conceive what they could feel, or what they might have been able to feel, had their outward circumstances been different.” 14 The underlying assumption of this hugely influential idea is that, however distinct one’s actual historical experience, all “truly” poetic experiences will allow their readers to identify with the generalized “human heart” they realize. 15 To say that Sexton flouted this injunction sounds obvious at first. One need only cite the title “In Praise of My Uterus,” for instance...
eBook - ePubThe Sexual Politics of Time
Confession, Nostalgia, Memory
- Susannah Radstone(Author)
- 2007(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Chapter 1 On confession It is characteristic of our present age that virtually all serious writing tends to be confessional. (Ong 1975:20) This chapter introduces the question of temporality into critical discussions of the confessional mode. After surveying the critical literature on confession, it argues that though a focus on temporality might appear to align confession with modernity, this would be a reductive and homogenizing view. Confessional criticism Contemporary cultural criticism suggests that confession continues to mark Western culture and that it remains of interest both to academics and to cultural critics. Recent conference literature refers to the continuing ‘compulsion to confess’ (Ashplant and Graham 2001) and to the ‘imperative to speak out … evident in popular culture … such as confessional television’ (Ahmed and Stacey 2001:1). 1 Peter Brooks’s recent treatment of the subject opines that confession is ‘deeply ingrained in our culture’ (Brooks 2000:2) and that confession is to be found everywhere, though especially in the ‘everyday business of talkshows’ (ibid. 4; see also Elsaesser 2001:196). A recent edition of a literary radio programme examined the significance and value of confessional literature and poetry (‘Off the Page’, 2000). Like Brooks, ‘Off the Page’ noted confession’s contemporary move from the more rarified arenas of poetry and literary prose, to the public (and more downmarket?) spheres of TV chatshows, televised courtrooms and presidential addresses. Meanwhile, the popularity and marketability of popular literary confessions was remarked upon in broadsheet journalism of the late 1990s (Bennett 1995; Wurtzel 1998). These recent treatments of confession appear to suggest, then, that the injunction to confess does arguably continue to impress itself across a range of cultural domains. These comments demonstrate, too, that confession extends far beyond the limits of autobiographical writing...
