Confessional+Poetry

Hi Following on from what we talked about in class, I was stuck by the first paragraph of this - and then the rest intersted me as well. It's from an essay called 'Confessional poetry & the artifice of honesty' which I found at 'The Free Library'. You can read the rest of it [|here]. "More than any other school, confessional poetry directly and vociferously opposed the "impersonality" argued for by T. S. Eliot in his essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent." If Eliot's credo was upheld by the New Critics--and by the poets writing during "the tranquilized Fifties" (as Lowell deemed them) including Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, Howard Nemerov, and Anthony Hecht--then by the end of that decade the tide had turned measurably. 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. All poets use their lives for poetry, but not all lives are used similarly. Often the particulars of a poet's life provide the basis for more general speculation, which constitutes the poem's bid for universality. Conversely, in confessional poetry such details can serve to deny universality by delineating the poet as apart and uniquely suffering. The "I" of the poem is meant as a direct representation of the flesh-and-blood poet. Through its enumeration of sins, the confessional poem emerges as a tragic self-portrait, its words inscribed, like Kafka's penal commandments, directly onto the hide of the writer. Confessionalism is a question of degree. What makes a poem confessional is not only its subject matter--e.g., family, sex, alcoholism, madness--or the emphasis on self, but also the directness with which such things are handled. Unflinching and generally extreme in their diction and address (certainly compared to what preceded them), the poems of Snodgrass, Lowell, Sexton, and Plath comprise a wide tonal range from sad whisper to hectoring squawk. What they have in common, what sets them apart from other poems that incorporate details from life, is their sense of worn-on-the-sleeve self-revelation and their artful simulation of sincerity. By relying on facts, on "real" situations and relationships, for a poem's emotional authenticity, the poet makes an artifice of honesty. Confessional poems, in other words, lie like truth."

And now for the poetry... =BRING IT ON!!!=