Oates named a roster of midcentury American poets who continue to be identified as “confessional,” even if poets themselves sometimes objected. Asked by Harper’s magazine what should be placed in a time capsule and left on the moon for intergalactic posterity, novelist Joyce Carol Oates recommended the confessional poems of Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, and W.D. According to scholar Deborah Nelson, Lowell’s “innovation was to make himself … available, not as the abstract and universal poet but as a particular person in a particular place and time.”īy the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing ten years after Life Studies first appeared, confessional poetry was in vogue. Their breaches in poetic and social decorum were linked. In the 1950s and 1960s, decades saturated with New Criticism dictates that the poet and “speaker” of a poem were never coincident, confessional poets insisted otherwise. They grounded their work in actual events, referred to real persons, and refused any metaphorical transformation of intimate details into universal symbols. They tended to utilize sequences, emphasizing connections between poems. Confessional poets wrote in direct, colloquial speech rhythms and used images that reflected intense psychological experiences, often culled from childhood or battles with mental illness or breakdown. The poems in Life Studies felt like a “series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.”įor most contemporary critics, confessional poetry marked a revolution in poetic style as well as specific subject matter and the relationship between a poem’s speaker and self. The personal had always been fodder for poetry, but Lowell, Rosenthal claimed, “removes the mask” that previous poets had worn when writing about their own lives. The book, which contained poems that unsparingly detailed Lowell’s experiences of marital strife, generational struggle, and mental illness, marked a dramatic turn in his career. Rosenthal coined it in his review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in the Nation. The phrase “confessional poetry” burst into common usage in September of 1959, when the critic M.L.
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