Assignment

On

Confessional Poetry

Submitted to Dr.S.Murali

Submitted by Drisya.K

Confessional Poetry
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 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. Confessionalism is a question of degree. What makes a poem confessional is not only its subject mattere.g., family, sex, alcoholism, madnessor the emphasis on self, but also the directness with which such things are handled. Unflinching and generally extreme in their diction and address, the poems of Snodgrass, Lowell, Sexton, and Plath comprise a wide tonal range from sad whisper to hectoring squawk. What they have in common, what sets them apart from other poems that incorporate details from life, is their sense of worn-on-the-sleeve self-revelation and their artful simulation of sincerity. By relying on facts, on real situations and relationships, for a poems emotional authenticity, the poet makes an artifice of honesty. Confessional poems, in other words, lie like truth. 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 ground breaking and shocking to some readers, these poets maintained a high level of craftsmanship through their careful attention to and use of prosody. Ever 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 poets 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. This confessional movement started with the works of Robert Lowell and John Berryman followed W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. These poets were against the new critical mode of writing poetry that emphasized on aloofness and impersonality. These confessional poets gave expression to painful personal events through the revelation of personal intimacies and unembarrassed self- exposure. In this sense by writing such poems based on their own private experience, the confessional poets reflect the liveliest period; but such private experiences were all about pains and sufferings. Some key texts of the American confessional school of poetry include Lowells Life Studies, Plaths Ariel, Berrymans The Dream Songs, and Snodgrass Hearts Needle. In 1959 M. L. Rosenthal first used the term confessional in a review of Robert Lowells 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 honour-bound not to reveal. Howe argues that the poetry of Lowell is confessional because the I really did mean his private self, not a persona created for the poems occasion. That is, Lowells poems were viewed as confessional because his personal thoughts reflected what was occurring in society. In the same way, people assumed that Lowell was telling the truth, which was inevitably his truth, not the views of a persona. Lowell himself encouraged the confessional label when he asserted that Life Studies was about direct experience, and not symbols; it tells his personal story and memories. What is unique about Lowell is that he grounds his personal poetry in the hidden past of the Lowell family - he focuses on the family disgraces, tensions, neuroses,

and failures. Lowell's book Life Studies was a highly personal account of his life and familial ties, and had a significant impact on American poetry. The hidden past is valuable to Lowell for what it has to teach us about the present. In particular, his nervous breakdowns are caused by memories from his past that haunt him. However, unlike other confessional poets, Lowell also explores the consequences of the past in modern society. One of the confessional poets of the same 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. Confessional poetry explores personal details about the authors' life without meekness, modesty, or discretion. 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. The expression of personal pain is the hallmark of confessional poetry. Moreover all the major figures of this group also suffered from several personal difficulties like destructive family relationship, traumatic childhoods, broken marriages, reasoning mental breakdowns, alcoholism, and drug abuse and so on. Most of the poets of this group were also widely affected by psychological disorder and thus, they dealt with the theme of psychology as well. Like, in the case of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, one may also find Oedipus tension, sexual confessions and suicidal urges as the subject matter in their work. The most common subject matter in the confession poetries is the madness. So these confessional poets are also known as ideocentric group of poets. The remarkable example of the confessional poetry is the work of Sylvia Plath, who is highly influenced by Anne Sexton. Snodgrass mentorship of Sexton influenced her to write The Double Image which is strongly inspired by "Heart's Needle". Anne Sexton's poetry is a poetry of life, a poetry of experience in spite of her constant longing for death, thus differing from Sylvia Plath's poetry, a poetry that mythologizes death, although she obviously also has a lot in common with Plath. What is typically

confessional about Sextons work is its handling of taboo or shocking subjects that were not traditionally discussed in poetry before the so-called confessional poets. These taboo subjects such as mental breakdowns, suicide, marital problems and incest were themselves hidden from poetry in the past. Sextons poems engaged in what was repressed, hidden, or falsified from an early stage in poems such as In the Beach House, which associated her parents lovemaking, the royal strapping, with a beating she had received from her father. However, Anne Sextons recurring themes were further expanded upon throughout her poetry so that any repressed feelings were finally revealed. The figures in Plath's early poems are not as weak as the personas in the poems of other confessional poets, they maintain a sort of ritualistic defence against their situation, her poems are poems that reflect the fight of the mind against extreme circumstances through intensification of its manipulative skills, which results in parody. The speakers of these poems are intelligent persons who don't succumb to circumstances, persons made rigid by suffering. It is through many of these speakers in her poems that Sylvia Plath reveals her own terrifying self-knowledge. In her middle period, Sylvia then writes poems whose characters cannot cope any more with their overwhelming, destructive life experiences, as in Zoo Keeper's Wife. Finally, in her later period, the speakers of her poems seem to be torn between the acceptance of their fate and loss of control over their lives and the need to find a way out of it, even through self-torture, as in Tulips. Sometimes the speaker's mind even rejoices in its self-imposed pain, as in The Tour. In her poems, Plath is not concerned with the nature of her experience, rather she is engaged in demonstrating the way in which the mind deals with extreme circumstances or circumstances to which it responds with excessive sensitivity. The typical strategy of her speakers is to heighten or exaggerate ordinary experience and at the same time to intensify the mind's manipulative skills so that fathers become Fascists and the mind that must deal with the image it has conjured up becomes rigidly ritualistic. In her early poems, Plath stands outside and judges her characters, drawing caricatures not only of madness but of its counterpart, hysterical sanity. As

she continued to write however, she began to let the characters speak for themselves in caricature, parody, and hyperbole which they use not as vehicles of judgment but as inevitable methods of their performances. As already stated, Sylvia Plath's poems address universal truths. Even a poem like Lady Lazarus, that is considered the most confessional of Plath's poems together with Daddy, must be read as a poem that reveals the way the suicidal person thinks, not only the speaker, but every suicidal person. In her works, she not only dealt with her personal problems, but through those problems she brings out the social problems of her times. Plath brought forth a sense of abandonment, guilt, emotional breakdown and suicidal attempt along with the use of fierce rhythm and violent images. Her most appreciated work in this respect is Ariel. The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry. The confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s pioneered a type of writing that forever changed the landscape of American poetry. The post-confessional poetry of the seventies and eighties continued to extrapolate on the themes that the confessional movement pioneered. Examples of post confessional poems include Robert Pinsky's collection History of My Heart (1984), Bill Knott's poem "The Closet" (1983), and Donald Hall's Kicking the Leaves (1978). In contemporary poetry many poets are adopting the same mindset. These poets include Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Judith Harris, and Jon Pineda. 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. Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner. The tradition of confessional poetry has been a major influence on generations of writers and continues to this day.

Bibliography Phillips, Robert S. The confessional poets. Southern Illinois University Press, 1973. Rieniets, Becky Lynn. Confessional poetry: Under Siege and Analyzed to Suicide. CUP: London, 1990. Beach, Christopher. The Cambridge introduction to twentieth-century American

Poetry. Cambridge University Press: London, 2003.