Confessional poet
Encyclopedia
Confessional poetry emphasizes the intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poet's personal life, such as in poems about mental illness, sexuality, and 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'. Some key texts of the American "confessional" school of poetry include Lowell's Life Studies
, Plath's Ariel, Berryman's The Dream Songs
, and Snodgrass' Heart's Needle. One of the most prominent consciously "confessional" poets to emerge in the 1980s was Sharon Olds
whose focus on taboo sexual subject matter built off of the work of Ginsberg.
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 is 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 have 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
had 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, although they were not to be published until 1967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."
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 is not 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 is specific to this poetry is self-revelation achieved through creating the poem. This passes on to the reader, and a connection is made.
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
.
John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
, Robert Lowell
Robert Lowell
Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...
, Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist and short story writer. Born in Massachusetts, she studied at Smith College and Newnham College, Cambridge before receiving acclaim as a professional poet and writer...
, Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke
Theodore Roethke was an American poet, who published several volumes of poetry characterized by its rhythm, rhyming, and natural imagery. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1954 for his book, The Waking.-Biography:...
, Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967...
, and William De Witt Snodgrass
William De Witt Snodgrass
William De Witt Snodgrass was an American poet who also wrote under the pseudonym S. S. Gardons. He won the 1960 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.-Life:W. D...
have all been called 'Confessional Poets'. Some key texts of the American "confessional" school of poetry include Lowell's Life Studies
Life Studies
Life Studies is the fourth book of poems by Robert Lowell. Most critics consider it one of Lowell's most important books, and the Academy of American Poets named it one of their Groundbreaking Books. The book won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960.-Publication:Life Studies was first...
, Plath's Ariel, Berryman's The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs
The Dream Songs is a compilation of two books of poetry, 77 Dream Songs and His Toy, His Dream, His Rest by the American poet, John Berryman...
, and Snodgrass' Heart's Needle. One of the most prominent consciously "confessional" poets to emerge in the 1980s was Sharon Olds
Sharon Olds
-Life:Sharon Olds was born in 1942 in San Francisco. She was raised as a “hellfire Calvinist”, as she describes it. She says she was by nature "a pagan and a pantheist" and notes "I was in a church where there was both great literary art and bad literary art, the great art being psalms and the bad...
whose focus on taboo sexual subject matter built off of the work of Ginsberg.
Development of definition
In 19591959 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* In the United States, "Those serious new Bohemians, the beatniks, occupied with reading their deliberately undisciplined, protesting verse in night clubs and hotel ballrooms, created more publicity...
M. L. Rosenthal first used the term "confessional" in a review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies
Life Studies
Life Studies is the fourth book of poems by Robert Lowell. Most critics consider it one of Lowell's most important books, and the Academy of American Poets named it one of their Groundbreaking Books. The book won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960.-Publication:Life Studies was first...
entitled 'Poetry as Confession
Poetry as Confession
Poetry as Confession was an influential article written by M. L. Rosenthal, reviewing the poetry collection Life Studies by Robert Lowell. The review is credited with being the first application of the term of confession to an approach to the writing of poetry. This led to an entire movement of...
', 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 is 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
The Kenyon Review
The Kenyon Review is a Literary magazine based in Gambier, Ohio, USA, home of Kenyon College. The Review was founded in 1939 by John Crowe Ransom, critic and professor of English at Kenyon College, who served as its editor until 1959...
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 have 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
Delmore Schwartz
Delmore Schwartz was an American poet and short story writer from Brooklyn, New York.-Biography:Schwartz was born and raised in Brooklyn, New York. His parents, Harry and Rose, both Romanian Jews, separated when Schwartz was nine, and their divorce had a profound effect on him. Later, in 1930,...
's Genesis had been published in 1943
1943 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* September 12 – Abraham Sutzkever, a Polish Jew writing poetry in Yiddish, escapes the Vilna Ghetto with his wife and hides in the forests. Sutzkever and fellow Yiddish poet Shmerke...
, and John Berryman
John Berryman
John Allyn Berryman was an American poet and scholar, born in McAlester, Oklahoma. He was a major figure in American poetry in the second half of the 20th century and was considered a key figure in the Confessional school of poetry...
had written his Sonnets to Chris in 1947
1947 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Dorothy Parker divorces Alan Campbell for the first time....
, although they were not to be published until 1967
1967 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:*Cecil Day-Lewis is selected as the new Poet Laureate of the UK....
(and then as Berryman's Sonnets). Berryman's sonnet sequence
Sonnet sequence
A sonnet sequence is a group of sonnets thematically unified to create a long work, although generally, unlike the stanza, each sonnet so connected can also be read as a meaningful separate unit....
fits in the long tradition of highly personal sonnet sequences, stretching back through George Meredith
George Meredith
George Meredith, OM was an English novelist and poet of the Victorian era.- Life :Meredith was born in Portsmouth, England, a son and grandson of naval outfitters. His mother died when he was five. At the age of 14 he was sent to a Moravian School in Neuwied, Germany, where he remained for two...
's Modern Love to William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...
's sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare's sonnets are 154 poems in sonnet form written by William Shakespeare, dealing with themes such as the passage of time, love, beauty and mortality. All but two of the poems were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled SHAKE-SPEARES SONNETS.: Never before imprinted. Sonnets 138 and 144...
and the sonnets of Petrarch
Petrarch
Francesco Petrarca , known in English as Petrarch, was an Italian scholar, poet and one of the earliest humanists. Petrarch is often called the "Father of Humanism"...
. 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
1955 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* The Group, a British poetry movement, starts meeting in London with gatherings taking place once a week, on Friday evenings, at first at Hobsbaum's flat and later at the house of Edward Lucie-Smith...
poem Howl
Howl
"Howl" is a poem written by Allen Ginsberg in 1955 and published as part of his 1956 collection of poetry titled Howl and Other Poems. The poem is considered to be one of the great works of the Beat Generation, along with Jack Kerouac's On the Road and William S. Burroughs's Naked Lunch...
, Allen Ginsberg
Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet and one of the leading figures of the Beat Generation in the 1950s. He vigorously opposed militarism, materialism and sexual repression...
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
1797 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* William Blake illustrates Edward Young's Night Thoughts...
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...
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 GuardianThe Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
on 20 April 1989
1989 in poetry
Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* Dead Poets Society, a film incorporating excerpts from many traditional poets, ending with the title and opening line of Walt Whitman's lament on the death of Abraham Lincoln, "O Captain! My...
, Ted Hughes
Ted Hughes
Edward James Hughes OM , more commonly known as Ted Hughes, was an English poet and children's writer. Critics routinely rank him as one of the best poets of his generation. Hughes was British Poet Laureate from 1984 until his death.Hughes was married to American poet Sylvia Plath, from 1956 until...
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
Denise Levertov
-Early life and influences:Levertov was born and grew up in Ilford, Essex.Couzyn, Jeni Contemporary Women Poets. Bloodaxe, p74 Her mother, Beatrice Spooner-Jones Levertoff, came from a small mining village in North Wales...
, Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Cecile Rich is an American poet, essayist and feminist. She has been called "one of the most widely read and influential poets of the second half of the 20th century."-Early life:...
, and Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde
Audre Lorde was a Caribbean-American writer, poet and activist.-Life:...
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 is not 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 is 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 [that writing cured my mental illness] particularly. It certainly did not create mental health. It isn’t as simple as my poetry makes it, because I simplified everything to make it more dramatic. I have 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 BlyRobert Bly
Robert Bly is an American poet, author, activist and leader of the Mythopoetic Men's Movement.-Life:Bly was born in Lac qui Parle County, Minnesota, to Jacob and Alice Bly, who were of Norwegian ancestry. Following graduation from high school in 1944, he enlisted in the United States Navy, serving...
in the preface to his 1983 translation of Antonio Machado
Antonio Machado
Antonio Cipriano José María y Francisco de Santa Ana Machado y Ruiz, known as Antonio Machado was a Spanish poet and one of the leading figures of the Spanish literary movement known as the Generation of '98....
'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
Language poets
The Language poets are an avant garde group or tendency in United States poetry that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s...
and New Formalism
New Formalism
New Formalism is a late-20th and early 21st century movement in American poetry that has promoted a return to metrical and rhymed verse.-Origins and intentions:...
.