Vietnam War poetry. Confessional Poetics (I). Every poem ever written has somehow been affected by the writer's life, but this is even more so with confessional poetry. The whole idea behind the movement is for the poet to honestly express his or her life stories as poetry, with little or no limitations. The Academy of American Poets defines Confessional Poetry as “Poetry of the personal or ‘I'”. Poetry that discussed the ‘personal' was hardly new in the 1950's and 60's. The Latin poets Propertius and Horace wrote in apparently revealing ways about their lives; this usually involved a persona or mask – that is, the assumption of a ‘pretend' character. In the fourteenth century Petrarch penned sonnets that frequently used the first person and discussed the poet's feelings and musings on humanity. Similarly Shakespeare's sonnets, written in the sixteenth century, expose facets of the poet to the reader. Back in the 1860s Emily Dickinson seems to have been writing confessional poetry in ballad form. It does not seem to have started a ‘movement' though. The genre came to the fore in the USA in the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast, the confessional poets sought to be honest in the exploration of their inmost selves. The term 'confessional' was probably first used by M. L. Rosenthal in a 1959 review of Life Studies by Robert Lowell. Yet what distinguishes the Confessional poets from other personal poetry is their rejection of the standards for appropriate content that saturated Academia during the middle of the twentieth century. During the 1950's New Criticism's sterile, and objective view of literature pervaded. The confessional poets' disregard for this approach in favor of an intimate and autobiographical one was shocking. Thus, confessional poetry is 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 US 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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