Knowing the history of your genre is part of the creative process, and its empowering. It has been described as poetry of the personal or i, focusing on extreme moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma, including previously and occasionally still taboo matters such as mental. One quickly discovers that the confessional poems legacy extends further than the expected plath, sexton, and lowell. American poets and it inspires ambivalent responses from critics.
It has become a potent force, and its practitioners the poetic voices of our time. The movement initiated with the publication of robert lowells volume of poetry life studies in 1959. Critics have faulted this sort of confessional performance art for practicing. L rosenthal, who was an american poet and the 20th century critic of poetry. The phrase confessional poetry burst into common usage in september of 1959, when the critic m. Confessional poetry traffics in intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about details of the poets personal life, such as in poems about illness, sexuality, despondence. The autobiographical impulse in english and american poetry is here explored in two poems and 28 essays by a range of contemporary poets. As surely as reality tv happened in the 1990s, confessional poetry belongs to the turn of the 1960s. The poetry is highly subjective, written with frankness and lack of restraint, and focuses on the ugliness of life. Confessional poetry or confessionalism is a style of poetry that emerged in the united states. When you write a poetry book, you become part of the creative conversation with poets past and present. In doing so, many contemporary poets have managed to write poems of personal experience while at the same time avoiding the criticism confessional poets like lowell, plath, and sexton received for their most unrelentingly intimate works resembling scenes from a private documentary, even from sympathetic readers like elizabeth bishop, who. This penlighten article gives you confessional poetry examples to help you grasp the concept in a better way. Each weighs in on a different area of the discussion, but all are evocative and engaging.
Confessional poetry is a genre of poetry, became popular in america in the decades immediately following the second world war. 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. A brief guide to confessional poetry academy of american. What confessional poetry is, who were confessional poets, and the best examples of famous confessional poems. The book would gain national attention and go on to win the pulitzer prize in. Explore various schools of poetry from modernist to beat to confessional poetry, and everything in between. Telling this story of confessions sudden ascent, poets and critics. The book, which contained poems that unsparingly detailed lowells experiences of marital strife, generational struggle, and mental illness, marked a dramatic turn in his career. In the late 1950s, confessional poetry emerged in the united states, which changed the landscape of american poetry forever. Confession and autobiography in the poetry of robert lowell, sylvia.
Lowells book life studies was a highly personal account of his life and familial ties and had a significant impact on american poetry. Confessional poetry as a genre was first characterized by the critic m. Anne sextons confessional tradition and individual talent sciendo. Grobe explains that the rise of confessional poetry is shaped by the. Or, as robert lowell put it in his national book award acceptance speech. Strangely enough, one may go back to the book of genesis in the scriptures. The confessional poets engagement with personal experience has been explained by literary critics as an effort to distance oneself from the horrifying. For most contemporary critics, confessional poetry marked a revolution in poetic style as. Life studies was nonetheless the first book in the confessional mode that. From midcentury confessional poetry to reality tv literary hub. It is sometimes also classified as a form of postmodernism.