22 - Confessional Poetry.docx

22 Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry is autobiographical, and is based on the life experiences of the poet. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath deserve credit for revolutionizing the art of poetry writing during the mid twentieth century. Two of the most famous confessional poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, wrote poetry that dealt with very personal and painful subjects in their lives. Their poetry was confessional in nature and Plath and Sexton were very troubled women who tragically took their own lives.

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. Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton have all been called 'Confessional Poets'. Some key texts of the American "confessional" school of poetry include Lowell's Life Studies and Plath's Ariel. 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. Beat poetry influenced nearly all American poets, but especially a group of "confessional" writers including Anne Sexton in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in the posthumously published Ariel (1965).

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. Notably, Sexton set the stage for female poets not only in her success, but also in her brave subject matter, such as menstruation, abortion, masturbation, and adultery. In this way, she helped to redraw the boundaries of poetry.

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 Sylvia 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

The imagery and attitudes in her poetry have their base in Plath's life experiences. Plath set impossibly high goals for herself. She joined a style of sarcasm and emotional intensity in her poetry. Plath wrote:

"I think I would like to call myself 'the girl who wanted to be God.' Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be- perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it"(Barnard 16).

Throughout her life, Plath kept a journal as a form of documentation of inspiration, a steady confident, and a record of a more private self as it captured her bluntness, her ambitions, and her creative ideas. Sylvia Plath’s writing technique and style both evolved dramatically throughout her life. After publishing her first poem in the Boston Herald in 1941, her writing style developed into what would become an obsession in her college years. Plath was a perfectionist and that drove her to succeed and fail at the same time. This created a kind of destructive energy, which presents itself in her later writings. Nearly all of Plath's early poetry is death related. In "Temper of Time," Plath uses somber terms to describe the landscape.

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.