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Topic: Confessional Poetry

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	Confessional poet - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Later developments in confessional poetry begin to blur the distinctions between a public and a private activism.
		Because of this, confessional poetry is a popular form of creative writing that many people enjoy not only to read but to embark upon.
		Some have argued that confessional free verse poetry has become the dominant approach in contemporary poetry, and that it has sparked both a reaction toward the more avant garde LANGUAGE poetry and the more traditional New Formalism.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Confessional_poet (665 words)

	American Literature: Poetry - MSN Encarta
		Confessional poetry broke away from modernism’s dedication to impersonality and reopened poetry to intense self-exploration and frank revelation of personal experiences.
		Although the early confessional poets rarely used their poetry to explore political issues, their investigations of how personal identity is constructed laid the ground for a more openly political poetry that emerged in America in the late 1950s and was still written at the century’s close.
		Confessional poetry in general served as a counterforce to the prevailing mood of the country in the 1950s and 1960s, when the family was presented in the mass media as the source of stability and happiness.
	encarta.msn.com /encyclopedia_761596671_4/American_Literature_Poetry.html (3048 words)

	poetrymagazines.org.uk - Getting Poetry to Confess (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Confessionalism is the movement by which contemporary culture has been marked in the past ten years, and its power shows no sign of dwindling.
		Confessionalism is the mode of poetry in prisons, in survivors’ groups, in writers’ groups, in adolescent bedrooms.
		Poetry as therapy is now a concept so devalued by the sheer volume of people who feel that they have a ‘poem’; in them that it is hard to take seriously.
	www.poetrymagazines.org.uk /magazine/record.asp?id=4935 (1725 words)

	Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton's early poetry Twentieth Century Literature - Find Articles
		Confessional poetry, a mode that was prominent in the United States in the 1960s and early 70s, has, over time, come to be regarded as a regrettable, aberrant, and momentary spasm in the development of that nation's literature.
		The more radical poetries of the past few decades, whatever their particular differences, have come to reconceive the "opening of the field," not as an entrance into authenticity but, on the contrary, as a turn toward artifice, toward poetry as making or praxis rather than poetry as impassioned speech, as self-expression.
		The implication that contemporary avant-garde poetry is "radical" while the confessional poetry that preceded it is reactionary and conservative itself merits scrutiny.
	www.findarticles.com /p/articles/mi_m0403/is_1_50/ai_n6333009 (922 words)

	A Certain Sense of Order: Confessionalism and Anne Sexton's Poetry (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Confessional poetry is, then, a specific and legitimate movement in twentieth century poetry, it is at once a modern manifestation of an ongoing tradition, a reaction against a previously dominant mode, and a unique development.
		Threatens to become a kind of legendary cultural tragedy which supports any of a variety of interpretations--the romantic one of her as a doomed artist, the psychiatric one of her as a schizophrenic exhibitionist, the mythopoetic one of her as a "dying [goddess]," the "feminist" one of her as a victim of the patriarchal culture.
		In the poetry deemed Confessional we presume the voice to be the historical Sexton (to a greater or lesser degree).
	www.contemporarypoetry.com /brain/poetry/prose/sextonessay.html (7592 words)

	The Academy of American Poets - Confessionalography: A GNAT (Grossly Non-Academic Talk) on "I" in Poetry
		Being "confessional" had something to do with breaking taboos, suffering, and claiming that the "self" of the poem was not "a speaker" but was actually the poet.
		Bad confessional poetry was even worse than bad Romantic poetry, and just as poets used to be scared of sounding academic and ivory tower, now they were scared of sounding too much like New Age mantra-posters or 12-steppers or people in asylums.
		Confessional Poetry is a hard boiled egg with a serrated knife lodged in its center and a tiny tear drop of blood on the knife's handle.
	www.poets.org /viewmedia.php/prmMID/5948 (2316 words)

	[No title]
		Our goal is to expose students to this kind of “good poetry”, that is, poetry that relies on the dramatic presentation of a particular type in its concretenessin our case a person to whom they can all relate, the father (or father figure).
		Confessional poetry’s inclusion of gritty and personal details distinctly separates the speaker, who is generally the poet, from the rest of the world.
		What distinguished confessional poets is their radical focus on themes that had been previously avoided in favor of a more idealized view of life.
	www.yale.edu /ynhti/nationalcurriculum/units/2005/1/05.01.07.x.html (5698 words)

	The Academy of American Poets - A Brief Guide to 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.
		The confessional poetry of the mid-twentieth century dealt with subject matter that previously had not been openly discussed in American poetry.
		The tradition of confessional poetry has been a major influence on generations of writers and continues to this day; Marie Howe and Sharon Olds are two contemporary poets whose writing largely draws upon their personal experience.
	www.poets.org /viewmedia.php/prmMID/5650 (445 words)

	Poetry's Autopsy \| Books \| The Stranger, Seattle's Only Newspaper
		Or, in case we’ve forgotten that Robert Lowell didn’t invent confessional poetry but just gave it a bad and inaccurate name, there are two thousand years of Japanese and Chinese bad-asses who fall into the same category.
		Confessional poetry isn’t the problem; the lack of criticism and direction is the problem.
		It is interesting that you should focus so much on poetry, on its lack, the sadness of this lack, and the potentiality for greatness revealed or betrayed by this sadness for the lack, for a great idea done wrong, since poetry is, for writing, quite possibly the last frontier.
	www.thestranger.com /seattle/Content?oid=26029 (1559 words)

	Poetry Magazine, Ellen Hinsey Interviewed by Sarah Montante, February 2003
		Poetry, strictly speaking, could not exist without both elements–that is, neither the writing of it, nor the reading of it–in that poetry always emerges out of a collective participation in language and human experience.
		Poetry is the point where the individual and the mythic (which is community in a metaphoric sense) merges with music and "the instant".
		But poetry is an independent ambassador for conscience: it answers to no one, its crosses borders without a passport, and it speaks the truth.
	www.poetrymagazine.com /archives/2003/Feb03/hinsey_interview.htm (933 words)

	Foetry Forum V.2 :: View topic - The Confessional Trend (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Confessional poetry is always written in earnest, the voice of the poem being inseparable from that of the poet.
		Poetry audiences are not trained analysts (who should have learned to resist and discourage the patient’s motivation to seek undeserving validation).
		The confessional trend is an enabler for the worst in the human poetic impulse.
	www.foetry.com /newbb/viewtopic.php?t=52&start=0 (4872 words)

	03.03.09: Postwar Poetry in the Ap Classroom
		Confessional poetry is an intensely emotional, direct approach to autobiographical content in which the poet removes the mask of impersonality and candidly discusses a personal event or issue.
		Confessional poetry is typically chatty in tone ñ conversational.
		Some older poetry, as can be read in Brooks and Warren’s Understanding Poetry, came in the form of incantantory exorcism, getting rid of a spell or curse in order to free oneself of the offense a nd of the ambivalence of the situation.
	www.yale.edu /ynhti/curriculum/units/2003/3/03.03.09.x.html (8012 words)

	Fence Magazine - v.1 n.2 - Regan Good
		What is understood as confessional poetry today does not have much in common with the particular triumphs of its original practitioners.
		When I think of great confessional poetry, I think of Lowell's "Skunk Hour." On the grossest level the reader learns details of what most would consider "private life," but it is when Lowell describes states of extreme metaphysical terror that he is the confessor I love:
		But to reject the confessional mode as pass or reductive would be to reject a kind of poem that has a great capacity to humanize.
	www.fencemag.com /v1n2/work/regangood.html (1650 words)

	Lowell Lecture (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		By it he was referring to a poetry that reveals to its readers aspects of the poet's private life that would conventionally be kept hidden, unless one were confessing to a priest (or in therapy with a psychiatrist).
		I'm always amazed that accounts of Confessional Poetry hardly ever mention Dickinson's example, although the Johnson edition of her complete poems came out in the mid-1950s; Sylvia Plath read those poems, & someone like RL would at least have been aware of them.
		In typical Confessional poetry, the reader gets an often uncomfortably detailed revelation of dramas in childhood, attacks of madness, infidelities in marriage, and so on.
	etext.lib.virginia.edu /railton/enam312/lects/apr24.html (574 words)

	Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America; ; Deborah Nelson
		Nelson situates the poetry and legal decisions as part of a far wider anxiety about privacy that erupted across the social, cultural, and political spectrum during this period.
		She explores the panic over the "death of privacy" aroused by broad changes in postwar culture: the growth of suburbia, the advent of television, the popularity of psychoanalysis, the arrival of computer databases, and the spectacles of confession associated with McCarthyism.
		Examining this interchange between poetry and law at its most intense moments of reflection in the 1960s, '70s, and '80s, Deborah Nelson produces a rhetorical analysis of a privacy concept integral to postwar America's self-definition and to bedrock contradictions in Cold War ideology.
	www.columbia.edu /cu/cup/catalog/data/023111/0231111207.HTM (503 words)

	Edward Byrne: "Examining the Poetry of Confession and Autobiography: 'After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography'"
		In his essay establishing the term "confessional" for this new movement of mid-twentieth century poets, Rosenthal recognized a further willingness by American poets to open their own personal faults and frailties, their most private histories and intimate experiences, for close examination by the readers of their poetry.
		Indeed, as Graham and Sontag point out, the characteristics of confessional poetry can now be detected, and their merits debated, in all aspects of American writing: "For good or ill, we live in the age of the memoir.
		One implication appears to be that a significant growth of influence by women poets has coincided with the period of confessional poetry, including poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and later decades, and that women's voices in poetry of autobiography represent a distinct and defining category in contemporary poetry.
	www.valpo.edu /english/vpr/byrneessayconfession.html (2480 words)

	Confessional Poetry
		One definition of what makes a poem ‘confessional’ is offered by Irving Howe, who argues that a ‘confessional poem would seem to be one in which the writer speaks to the reader, telling him, without the mediating presence of imagined event or persona, something about his life’.
		While these poems frequently engage in what is repressed, hidden and falsified, defining them as ‘confessional’ undermines the creative ability of the writer to construct a persona or imaginary scenario that is separate from their lives.
		Rosenthal argued that Plath was a ‘confessional’ poet because she ‘followed Lowell’s autobiographical method in Life Studies.’ (4) Likewise, Edward Butscher argues that ‘Plath’s confessionalism was the ultimate goal of her poetic career.’ (5) Howe also describes Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’ as a ‘confessional’ poem because it discusses her recurrent suicide attempts.
	www.angelfire.com /zine/donnamford/confessional.html (2928 words)

	Archives \| Confessional poetry by David Yezzi, Vol. 16 (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Poetry itself rarely generates headlines, and the story perhaps missed in all the furor over Birthday Letters is that of the confessionals, to which Hughes’s book provides an illuminating coda.
		What distinguishes confessional poetry’s management of autobiography from that of, say, the New York school, and from the lyric in general, is the rawness of its address and the incorporation of guilty personal detail for emotional effect.
		It is ironic that Plath’s poetry, which transformed biography into a highly original iconography of hate and despair, would become inseparable from the details of her life for subsequent generations of readers.
	www.newcriterion.com /archive/16/jun98/confess.htm (3457 words)

	Anne Sexton (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Anne Sexton - confessional, intimate, direct - her recorded voice as intriguing as William Burroughs' or Ezra Pound's - even fronted a jazz-rock band towards the end, reciting all her pretty ones to a beat.
		Born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928 and living all of her life in or near Boston, her first book of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960; her last, Words for Dr. Y.
		She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1967 for Live or Die.
	www.inch.com /~ari/as1.html (129 words)

	Poetry Vocabulary
		confessional poetry: a school of poetry where the poet may expose personal, taboo, difficult things about themselves (Sylvia Plath; Anne Sexton; Sharon Olds); dramatic monologue poetry often does this, but the poet is confessing from within another persona's mind (Ai).
		modernist poetry: a school of poetry that moved away from the emotions, the focus on coherent notions of the self of the romantics; often experiments with form (or focuses on form) to examine the fragmentation of subjectivity or selfhood; begins in 1914 with WWI (TS Elliot).
		romantic poetry (romantic poet): a specific "school" of poetry (or a grouping of poets doing similar things; a movement) that focused on celebrating the energy and beauty of nature; nature as spirituality, as more "real".
	research.uvsc.edu /mortensen/2250/assignments/poetryvocab.html (1204 words)

	Foetry Forum V.2 :: View topic - Confessionalism (Again) (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Poetry class, conversely, was this read-aloud horror-fest of rape and stepfatherly humiliation that launched all eyes shoeward until the author would laugh and confess hers were not real confessional poems.
		The other large group of poetry consumers is made up of the non-elite refuse that is outside of or on the fringe of academia.
		Poetry should be for everyone and not defined by the few who are published--after all, of all the poems that is written in the world, written in a day, how many of them are ever published?
	foetry.com /newbb/viewtopic.php?p=3084 (11664 words)

	The Harvard Crimson :: News :: Inward Bound
		Because confessional poetry has not been sufficiently defined as a genre, critics judge the poetry only by blurry, often subjective, standards.
		Instead of glib categories, critics should produce analyses of the problems unique to the new poetry and assessments of poets as poets, rather than as representatives of their not-yet-defined generation.
		Lapses in personal poetry, then, can be either failures at any step of this ritual--such as the unquestioning immersion in narcissism which leads to psychic laundry lists--or simple failures of poetic technique.
	www.thecrimson.com /printerfriendly.aspx?ref=177092 (943 words)

	A+ Writing - Sample Research Papers
		Before speaking about confessional poetry of Theodore Roethke, I think it is necessary to make at least a short review about the poet's not easy life and then turn to his poetry.
		As a small boy Theodore was especially affected by the large field and green house which were situated near their house and they became an important image in his poetry.
		I'd like to mention Roethke's poetry is firmly rooted in the realm of his own experience and the craft of his poesy is as sensual as the world that surrounds him.
	www.awriting.com /samples/poetry.htm (985 words)

	Marsha Bryant / Graduate Seminars (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-11-01)
		Williams's mapping of the shifting definitions of "culture" proves especially important for poetry studies; English intellectuals have often invoked the genre as a metonym for "culture" since the Romantics.
		This seminar will examine Confessional Poetry in three contexts: (1) as a postmodern, American literary movement; (2) as a key emergence from 1950s culture; (3) as a model for contemporary confessional culture such as memoirs and talk shows.
		On the one hand, it marks a necessary emergence from the nineteenth-century idea of the "poetess," which confined women's poetry to the realms of sentimental verse and domesticity.
	www.clas.ufl.edu /users/mbryant/seminars.html (751 words)

	John Berryman - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		By that time Berryman, though not a "popular" poet, was well established as an important force in the literary world of poetry, and he was widely read among his contemporaries.
		Because readers assumed that these voices were the poet speaking directly of himself, Berryman's poetry was considered part of the Confessional poetry movement.
		Snodgrass, the original confessional poet, was one of the members of his class.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/John_Berryman (1983 words)

	Gale Literary Databases - Document
		When M. Rosenthal first used the term, confessional poetry, he had in mind a phase in Robert Lowell's career when Lowell turned to themes of sexual guilt, alcoholism, confinement in a mental hospital, and developed them in the first person in a way that intended, in Rosenthal's view, to point to the poet himself.
		Rosenthal was careful to limit the possibilities of the mode but he did name Sylvia Plath a confessional poet as well because, he said, she put the speaker herself at the center of her poems in such a way as to make her psychological vulnerability and shame an embodiment of her civilization.
		Rosenthal's widely accepted estimation was challenged first by Ted Hughes who pointed out that Plath uses autobiographical details in her poetry in a more emblematic way than Lowell, and more recently by Marjorie Perloff who claims that Plath's poetry lacks the realistic detail of Lowell's work.
	www.sylviaplath.de /plath/uroff.html (4883 words)

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