confessional poetry

confessional poetry, an autobiographical mode of verse that reveals the poet's personal problems with unusual frankness. The term is usually applied to certain poets of the United States from the late 1950s to the late 1960s, notably Robert Lowell, whose Life Studies (1959) and For the Union Dead (1964) deal with his divorce and mental breakdowns. Lowell's candour had been encouraged in part by that of the gay poet Allen Ginsberg in Howl (1956) and by the intensely personal poetry of Theodore Roethke. Other important examples of confessional poetry are Anne Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), including poems on abortion and life in mental hospitals; John Berryman's Dream Songs (1964) on alcoholism and insanity; Sylvia Plath's poems on suicide in Ariel (1965); and W. D. Snodgrass's Heart's Needle (1969) on his divorce. The term is sometimes used more loosely to refer to any personal or autobiographical poetry, but its distinctive sense depends on the candid examination of what were at the time of writing virtually unmentionable kinds of private distress. The genuine strengths of confessional poets, combined with the pity evoked by their high suicide rate (Berryman, Sexton, and Plath all killed themselves), encouraged in the reading public a romantic confusion between poetic excellence and inner torment.

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