Confessional Poetry

Core Idea

Confessional poetry is a mode of American poetry from the late 1950s and 1960s that made the poet's private life its open subject: mental illness, family conflict, divorce, sexuality and thoughts of suicide. The critic M. L. Rosenthal named it in a 1959 review of Robert Lowell's *Life Studies*. Its central figures include Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. The poems sound intimate and direct, but they are shaped with deliberate craft, and their "I" is still a constructed speaker.

How It's Best Learned

Read Lowell's "Skunk Hour" and then Plath's "Daddy" or "Lady Lazarus," and mark where each poem names a real-seeming detail and where it shifts into image, myth or exaggeration. Compare these with an earlier modernist poem that keeps the self hidden, such as Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Discuss what the poems gain and risk by seeming to tell the truth about the poet.

Common Misconceptions

• A confessional poem is a diary entry set in lines. (These poets revised heavily and used meter, rhyme, persona and myth. Plath's "Lady Lazarus" turns a suicide attempt into a stage performance with a mythic title.)
• The speaker of a confessional poem is simply the poet, and every detail is true. (The poems invite that reading, but poets altered facts and used masks. Berryman's *Dream Songs* speak through a figure called Henry.)
• The confessional poets wrote as a self-declared school. (The label came from critics. The poets knew and influenced one another, and Sexton and Plath both attended Lowell's poetry class at Boston University in 1959.)

Explainer

For much of the early twentieth century, many admired poets kept their private lives out of view. T. S. Eliot wrote in 1919 that poetry is "not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality." Poems could be personal in feeling, but the poet's own illnesses and family quarrels were not usually the stated subject.

In 1959 Robert Lowell published *Life Studies*. Its prose memoir and poems describe his parents, his marriage, and his time in a psychiatric hospital. In "Skunk Hour" the speaker drives at night to watch lovers' cars and says, "My mind's not right." The critic M. L. Rosenthal reviewed the book under the title "Poetry as Confession," and the label "confessional poetry" stuck. The same year W. D. Snodgrass published *Heart's Needle*, about his separation from his young daughter. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 1960.

Two students in Lowell's 1959 class at Boston University carried the mode further. Anne Sexton's first book, *To Bedlam and Part Way Back* (1960), drew on her own psychiatric hospitalization. Sylvia Plath, who died in February 1963, left the poems collected in *Ariel* (1965). "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" speak of a dead father, of suicide attempts, and of rage, using fierce rhythms and shocking images, including Holocaust imagery that critics still debate.

The word "confessional" can mislead. A confession suggests a plain, true statement. These poems are made with care. Lowell often used rhyme and meter. Plath built "Lady Lazarus" around a mythic figure who returns from death as a performance for a crowd. John Berryman's *77 Dream Songs* (1964) speak through a character called Henry, sometimes in blackface dialect, which lets the poet both reveal and hide himself. Real experience is the raw material, and the poem is still a made thing.

When you read a confessional poem, separate three things: the biographical facts you may know, the speaker the poem creates, and the choices of image and form that shape both. Ask why the poem wants you to believe it is telling the truth, and what that belief does to your response.