(1.4) Confessional Poetry

- the most influential poetry movement after 1945, prominent in late 1950s and beyond

- Confessionalism was represented in history by the ancient Greek poet Sappho, St Augustine's Confessions (398), etc.

- most recently anticipated by Walt Whitman who wrote in the first person, but in an assumed masque rather than in a purely autobiographical mode

- the poems typically give an autobiographical impression, but need not be such (e.g. Anne Sexton admits she does not write autobiography but presents fiction as if it was one)

- wrote in an open form, in free verse

- regarded poetry writing as an act of self-therapy

- focused on presenting one's private suffering in order to make it universally shared by readers

- the poem speakers suffer mental problems and instability, their egos are sick and haunted by many obsessions

- for the first time poetry explores the taboo topics of suicide, alcoholism, perversion, etc.

- many of the confessional poets actually did commit suicides

Robert Lowell (1917 - 1977)

- his earliest published collections were in the vein of Formalist Academic poetry, were admired and won many prizes

- still turned to Confessional poetry, considered the founder of the Confessional movement

- later wrote also sonnets on personalities of America, these were not much appreciated

> Life Studies (1959):

- the collection breaks with Formalism and introduces Confessionalism

- abandons regular metre and rhymes in favour of prose poems

- resembles journal or diary entries, dramatizes intimate subjects from his own life

- intensely autobiographical, personal, very subjective, even subjectivist

> "Skunk Hour" (Life Studies, 1959):

- a famous Confessional poem addressed to an upper-class woman residing in the New England coastal area

- employs striking descriptions ("hill's skull") and unusual actions (watching lovers in cars), which give the sense of something being wrong with the speaker's mind

- features a speaker obsessed with his own love life and its problems

- the structure of the poem is formalistic, uses interlocked rhymes and regular stanza patterns

Theodore Roethke (1908 - 1963)

- started as a Formalist poet and never completely abandoned the Formalist mode

- wrote in a great variety and forms and approaches

- managed to publish his poems in magazines, was acquainted with poets as W. H. Auden or William Carlos Williams

- wrote long free verse poems in a visionary mode influenced by mysticism

- like Romantics used nature to explore mental states, also employed Transcendentalist approaches

- later turned to poetry of psychoanalysis, himself suffered serious mental breakdowns

- mingles elements of Confessional and metaphysical poetry

> "Open House" (Open House, 1941):

- influenced by W. B. Yeats and his traditional metaphysical poetry, mystical themes, and national poetry

- also influenced by the metaphysical poets, especially by John Donne, by William Blake, and by Emily Dickinson

- uses a relatively conventional form, regular metre and rhyme

- opts for a simple vocabulary, words of Anglo-Saxon rather than foreign origin, uses short monosyllabic rhymes

- the rigid form contrast with the content describing the going out of one's mind

- uses the metaphor of a self-confessional writer standing as an open house

> "Child on Top of a Greenhouse" (The Lost Son and Other Poems, 1948):

- uses free verse, chooses longer words, includes Latin-based words for the names of the flowers

- introduces an original subject, a Confessional poem from the limited point of view of a child

- preoccupied with the natural world of greenhouse and with gardening for commerce

- sometimes assumes the voice of a planter (his uncle owned a greenhouse for commercial planting)

> "The Far Field" (The Far Field, 1964):

- the introductory lines classify the poem as a driving car poem

- describes natural world and relates these observations to himself

- later in the poem becomes metaphysical, contemplates eternity and such concepts

- follows the Transcendental journey of the self through both cultivated landscape (the field) and wild nature (the river)

- uses the approach of feeling for the suffering of others, similarly like Walt Whitman

- the sympathetic approach, Romanticism and Transcendentalism were not popular modes in 1940s to 1950s

> "Wish for a Young Wife" and "In a Dark Time" (The Far Field, 1964):

- later Formalist poems, the latter at the same time in a strongly Confessional mode

Elizabeth Bishop (1911 - 1979)

- her poetry resembles that of the Projectivist poet Charles Olson (1910 - 1970)

- interfuses the metaphysical and the confessional, but is not as emotional as the most other confessional poets

- preoccupied with lonely individuals in her poetry

- often wrote about animals, especially fish, about exotic landscapes, etc.

- in her choice of nature subjects resembles the work of the Modernist poet Marianne Moore (1887 - 1972)

- influenced many other, especially female poets

- received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry (1956)

> "The Fish" (North and South, 1946):

- the speaker catches a fish which does not struggle

- the speaker finds the fish admirable, she discovers a wonder in the familiar when the familiar is observed closely

- the fish has already survived several attacks, the speaker comes to pity him and drops the fish back to the water

> "One Art" (Geography III, 1976):

- a villanelle on a similar subject as John Berryman's "The Ball Poem"

- moves from a smaller to a larger loss, but takes them all stoically

- ironically belittles the pain of losing by claiming that "the art of losing isn't hard to master"

> "In the Waiting Room" (Geography III, 1976):

- an adult woman recalls accompanying her aunt to the dentist in the year 1918 when she was seven

- from the point of view of a child-anthropologist meditating on what we are and where we come from

John Berryman (1914 - 1972)

- his father committed suicide when he was twelve

- himself suffered depression, turned to alcoholism, and eventually committed suicide

- his poetry was influenced by W. B. Yeats and W. H. Auden

- won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry

> "The Ball Poem" (The Dispossessed, 1948):

- describes the symbolical first encounter of a little boy with the feeling of an irreplaceable loss

> The Dream Songs (1969):

- the collection assumes three different personae and makes each of them speak in the first person

- uses satire and irony, makes it difficult to determine whether the poet is seriously autobiographical of playfully ironic

> "A Professor's Song" (The Dream Songs, 1969):

- a humorous description of a poetry lesson on British Romantic poets

- a playful mocking of the serious pomposity of academics

- begins out of nowhere at the middle of a phrase, makes radical shifts in syntax as well as in meanings

> "Dream Song 14" (The Dream Songs, 1969):

- a humorous undermining of serious literature

- a self-confession of an obstinately bored vagabond

Randall Jarrell (1914 - 1965)

> "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner":

- a ball turret is a plexiglass sphere occupied by one gunner which was mounted on aircraft during World War II

- develops the metaphor of a ball turret as a mother's womb in which the gunner is enclosed

- based on an actual incident in which a gunner was killed by explosive shells and his remains were unceremoniously washed out of the turret with a steam hose

Richard Hugo (1923 - 1982)

- born in White Center, a suburb of Seattle, state Washington, which is the haunt of many of his poems

- was abandoned by his mother and brought up by his maternal grandparents, was unable to leave their house for years, though he was oppressed, beaten up by older boys, etc.

- preoccupied with the small-town life and madness of its inhabitants, his favourite colour to use in his poems was grey

- resembles in the choice of his subject the poetry of Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869 - 1935)

> "Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg":

- a driving car poem describing the speaker's stop in the abandoned small town of Philipsburg, Montana

- the poet himself lived in a small town which was established at the site of silver mines and which became a ghost town once the mines were exhausted, the only well-preserved buildings are the typically American many different churches

- portrays the uniformly boring, grey, and lonely life in the small town

- concludes with the realization that it is necessary to kill the memory of the small-town and leaves the desolate place

> "Letter to Kizer from Seattle":

- an epistle addressed to the fellow poet Carolyn Kizer (b. 1925) also associated with the poetry of the Pacific Northwest

- autobiographical, intensely personal, reflects the period in the poet's life in which he went insane while driving

- say thank you to the friend who helped him out of depression related to the negative aspects of success and to ageing

> "White Center":

- the speaker returns in his imagination to the painful memories of his childhood spent in White Center

- addresses an old woman who brought him up, but the address "you" may refer equally to the suburb where he grew up

- the mention of "murder" suggests the violence which filled the poet in his youth and which he had to suppress

- describes the corrupting effects of the small-town life on its inhabitants, denies the neighbours any notion of class

- the speaker ends up happily and leaves behind the suburban working class society with its essential loneliness, sense of insanity, religious pretentiousness, fights, etc.

> "Gray Stone":

- a later poem from his Stone Sequence on coloured stones but also on the larger life

- takes such a stance to the stone almost as if it were a partner for conversation

- contrasts the permanency of the stone and the fleeting nature of human life

Anne Sexton (1928 - 1974)

- suffered psychical problems throughout her life, committed suicide

> "Her Kind" (To Bedlam and Part Way Back, 1960):

- the speaker expresses the feeling that nobody understands her

- compares herself to a supernatural creature, to a witch

> "The Truth the Dead Know" (All My Pretty Ones, 1962):

- the speaker tries to comes to terms with the deaths of her parents which followed closely one upon another

> "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman" (Love Poems, 1969):

- the poem presents a confusing surreal intercourse between a dominant man and a suppressed woman figure

Sylvia Plath (1932 - 1963)

- married the British poet Ted Hughes, was separated from him in 1962

- attempted suicide several times, killed herself a year after the separation from her husband

- preoccupied with pain in her poetry

> "Tulips" (Ariel, 1965):

- the speaker lies in a hospital after miscarriage and projects her surroundings into her thoughts (Plath actually miscarried)

- associates the hospital whiteness around her with purity, longs to die, to merge herself with the purity

- associates the redness of the tulips with life and with her responsibilities as a wife and mother

- seeks to leave her body and disconnect herself from life

> "Daddy" (Ariel, 1965):

- one of the most famous hate poems of any time

- the 30-year-old speaker addresses her dead father, a Nazi official, and transforms private suffering into a public drama

- interfuses autobiography and fiction

- appropriates the facts of her own life into the poem (her father's death when she was about eight years old, her attempted suicide when she was twenty, etc.)

- thinks herself into being Jewish and assumes the role of a Nazi victim (the poet herself was of non-Jewish origin and did not personally experience the Second World War)

- the daughter suffers the Electra-complex arising from the communication problem with her authoritative father

- the strong emotions and strained approaches contrasts with the relatively conventional form

- the rhyme scheme overuses one rhyme group, exploits especially the /u/ sound

> "Ariel" (Ariel, 1965):

- the poet rides her horse Ariel in the English country during the absence of her husband

- turns even the most peaceful images into violent ones

> "Elm" (Ariel, 1965):

- a meditation on the many aspects of life