Confessional poetry

Confessional poetry or 'Confessionalism' is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the 1950s. It has been described as poetry "of the personal," focusing on extreme moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma, including previously taboo matter such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide, often set in relation to broader social themes.[1] It is sometimes also classified as Postmodernism.[2]

The school of "Confessional Poetry" was associated with several poets who redefined American poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Allen Ginsberg, and W. D. Snodgrass.[3][4]

Life Studies and the emergence of Confessionalism

In 1959 M. L. Rosenthal first used the term "confessional" in a review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies entitled "Poetry as Confession",[5] Rosenthal differentiated the confessional approach from other modes of lyric poetry by way of its use of confidences that (Rosenthal said) went “beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment”.[6] Rosenthal notes that in earlier tendencies towards the confessional there was typically a "mask" that hid the poet's "actual face", and states that “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 honor-bound not to reveal”.[7] In a review of the book in The Kenyon Review, John Thompson wrote, "For these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest: what they have won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry."[8]

There were however clear moves towards the "confessional" mode before the publication of Life Studies. Delmore Schwartz's confessional long poem Genesis had been published in 1943; and John Berryman had written a sonnet sequence in 1947 about an adulterous affair he'd had with a woman named Chris while he was married to his first wife, Eileen (however, since publishing the sonnets would have revealed the affair to his wife, Berryman didn't actually publish the sequence, titled Berryman's Sonnets, until 1967, after he divorced from his first wife).[9][10] Snodgrass' Heart's Needle, in which he writes about the aftermath of his divorce, also preceded Life Studies.

Life Studies was nonetheless the first book in the confessional mode that captured the reading public's attention and the first to officially be labeled "confessional." Most notably "confessional" were the poems in the final section of Life Studies in which Lowell alludes to his struggles with mental illness and his experiences in a mental hospital. Plath remarked upon the influence of these types of poems from Life Studies in an interview in which she stated, "I've been very excited by what I feel is the new breakthrough that came with, say, Robert Lowell's Life Studies, this intense breakthrough into very serious, very personal, emotional experience which I feel has been partly taboo. Robert Lowell's poems about his experience in a mental hospital, for example, interested me very much."[11] A. Alvarez however considered that some poems in Life Studies seemed “more compulsively concerned with the processes of psychoanalysis than with those of poetry”;[12] while conversely Michael Hofmann saw the verbal merit of Lowell's work only diminished by emphasis on “what I would call the C-word, 'Confessionalism'”.[13]

Further developments

Other key texts of the American "confessional" school of poetry include Plath's Ariel, Berryman's The Dream Songs, and Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back, though Berryman himself rejected the label "with rage and contempt":[14]

The word doesn't mean anything. I understand the confessional to be a place where you go and talk with a priest. I personally haven't been to confession since I was twelve years old.[15]

Another significant, if transitional figure was Adrienne Rich;[16] while 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.

Reaction

In the 1970s and 1980s, some writers rebelled against Confessionalism in American poetry, arguing that it was too self-indulgent. For instance, one of the foremost poets of the Deep Image school, Robert Bly, was highly critical of what he perceived to be the solipsistic tendencies of Confessional poets. He referenced this aesthetic distaste when he praised the poet Antonio Machado for "his emphasis on the suffering of others rather than his own".[17] However, many others writers during this period, like Sharon Olds, Marie Howe, and Franz Wright, were strongly influenced by the precedent set by Confessional poetry with its themes of taboo autobiographical experience, of the psyche and the self, and revelations of childhood and adult traumas.

The poetic movement of New Formalism, a return to rhyme and meter, would also spring from a backlash against free verse that had become popular in Confessional poetry. Another poetry movement that formed, in part, as a reaction to confessional poetry included the Language poets.

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ I. Ousby ed. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 199
  2. ↑ Postmodernist Poetry: a Movement or an Indulgence?, by Peter R. Jacoby
  3. ↑ W.D. Snodgrass, Poet biography; Poets.org
  4. ↑ I. Ousby ed. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 199
  5. ↑ The Nation, September 19, 1959), reprinted in Rosenthal 1991, pp. 109 – 112. Rosenthal somewhat reworked the review into an essay "Robert Lowell and the Poetry of Confession" in his 1960 book The Modern Poets
  6. ↑ Ian Hamilton, 'A Biographer's Msgivings', collected in Walking Possession, Essays & Reviews 1968 – 1993, Addison-Wesley, 1994. ISBN 0-201-48397-1
  7. ↑ Rosenthal, 1959.
  8. ↑ Thompson, John, "Two Poets", Kenyon Review 21 (1959), pp. 482 – 490.
  9. ↑ Kirsch, p. 2, makes this observation in his reassessment of the historical context of Life Studies.
  10. ↑ Mariani, Paul. Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman.
  11. ↑ Orr, Peter, ed. "The Poet Speaks - Interviews with Contemporary Poets Conducted by Hilary Morrish, Peter Orr, John Press and Ian Scott-Kilvert". London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966.
  12. ↑ A. Alvarez, The New Poetry (1978) p. 29
  13. ↑ M. Hofmann, Robert Lowell (2006) p. xiv
  14. ↑ Stitt, Peter. John Berryman, The Art of Poetry, "The Paris Review", No. 53, Winter 1972.
  15. ↑ Stitt, Peter. John Berryman, The Art of Poetry, "The Paris Review", No. 53, Winter 1972.
  16. ↑ I. Ousby ed. The Cambridge Guide to Literature in English (1995) p. 199 and p. 792
  17. ↑ Bly, Robert (translator), Machado, Antonio, Times Alone, Wesleyan University Press, 1983, ISBN 978-0-8195-6081-0, page 1.

References

This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the Wednesday, April 13, 2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.