Confessional Poetry

The phrase “confessional poetry” burst into common usage in September of 1959, when the critic M.L. Rosenthal coined it in his review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in the Nation. 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. 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 poems in Life Studies felt like a “series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.”

For 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. 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. They tended to utilize sequences, emphasizing connections between poems. They grounded their work in actual events, referred to real persons, and refused any metaphorical transformation of intimate details into universal symbols. 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. Their breaches in poetic and social decorum were linked. 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.”

By the time of the Apollo 11 moon landing ten years after Life Studies first appeared, confessional poetry was in vogue. 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. Snodgrass. Oates named a roster of midcentury American poets who continue to be identified as “confessional,” even if poets themselves sometimes objected. Though Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle was also published in 1959 and widely deemed one of the first and finest examples of “confessional poetry,” he “hated” the term “because it suggested either that you were writing something religious and were confessing something of that sort, or that you were writing bedroom memoirs, and I wasn’t doing that, either.” Others tangentially grouped as confessional poets also rejected the label, notably Elizabeth Bishop and Adrienne Rich, who later lamented the intense introspection of confessional poetry and wrote of those years, “We found ourselves / reduced to I.”

What confessional poets were doing—and why—remains the subject of literary and cultural criticism and debate. Diane Middlebrook has insisted that the term is best applied to specific books “that appeared between 1959–1966” rather than poets. Critics writing in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s claimed that confessional poetry was merely an extension of lyric poetry itself. More recently, scholars have sought to situate the confessional turn in its historical moment. In an era of Cold War “containment” culture and intense legal debates over privacy, confessional poets carved out new zones for private life and experience. They also seized upon shifting conditions of production and reception, using poetry readings, performances, and new kinds of publicity to circulate their work. Confessional poetry wasn’t just a style of presentation but also a lens through which audiences understood poems and poets. “[W]hat had changed,” in these decades, according to Christopher Grobe, “more than art, was the audience’s desire. They wanted to know … their poets and politicians, their actors and news anchors, too.” In this way, confessional poetry helped inaugurate a range of social and artistic practices aimed at uncovering, exposing, confessing, and sharing new, more intimate versions of disparate selves.

The collection that follows is intended to give you a sense of the poets, poems, and recordings that constituted confessional poetry and its extended afterlife. It is by no means exhaustive. Confessional poetry, as a historical literary movement, is generally thought to have ended by the 1970s, but its concerns and techniques seeped into numerous other styles and circles, from performance poetry to slam. Although the original confessional poets were all white, middle- or upper-class, and heterosexual, their insistence that trauma and—in the case of poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath—painful realities of gender and patriarchy were not simply subjects worthy of poems but also experiences that altered the very conditions of poetry have inspired countless others.