The Confessional Poets
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In the 1960's, a new school of American poets emerged whom M. L. Rosenthal, in his book The New Poets, labelled "The Confessional Poets" (Phillips 1973). Confessional poets distinguished themselves by their frank, autobiographical work detailing their experiences and, frequently, their personal weaknesses and failures. The poetry itself, like the subject matter, was often raw, lacking a crisp, predictable metrical structure, and confessional poets expressed themselves in the first person, using straightforward, unadorned language. Although one can find examples of "confessional" poetry dating back to Ancient Greece, and the inklings of confessional poetry as we know it can be found in the work of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the modern school traces its immediate roots to Robert Lowell and his part prose, part poetry book Life Studies, published in 1959; aside from Lowell, two of the most famous confessional poets were Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. This research will discuss the confessional poetry of Lowell, Sexton and Plath as well as the earlier, "proto-confessional" work of Whitman and Dickinson. Little in Robert Lowell's earlier work hinted at the revolutionary flood he unleashed in Life Studies. Lowell had of course written personal pieces before the publication of Life Studies, but his earlier poetry was written in more traditional closed forms, and it lacked the blunt, sometimes shocking honesty of his confessional work. After suffering a nervous breakdo
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the poem. The unpredictability of the rhymes gives the poem an uneven, jumpy feel which effectively mirrors Sexton's own uneasiness with her parents' inability to come to terms with her after her suicide attempt.
The poem above reflects Sexton's personal experience. Although Sexton was among the most autobiographical of the confessional poets, not all of her poems were strictly personal. Sexton at times assumed personae in poems which were not strictly autobiographical, and she openly confessed that she "would alter any word, attitude, image or persona for the sake of the poem" (Maio 79).
One of Sexton's non-autobiographical poems is "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward," about a young mother giving up her illegitimate child. Written in the first person, the poem has the same power and feel of her most confessional poetry; it is poems such as this, however, which serve as reminders that the important factor in confessional poetry is sincerity, not authenticity. Sexton never bore, much less gave up, an illegitimate daughter, but during one of her bouts with mental illness, her young daughter went to live with Sexton's mother-in-law. The poem is therefore not a factual account of Sexton's life, but it is an emotionally ac
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Approximate Word count = 2392
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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