Vietnam War poetry, ‘Confessional Poetics' (IV). Elizabeth Bishop, poet Laureate of the US from 1949 to 1950, wrote that she disliked the poetic trend of, “more and more anguish and less and less poetry. M.L. Rosenthal wrote in a review, “It is hard not to think of Robert Lowell's Life Studies as a series of confidences, rather shameful….”. It was the confessional poets' willingness to discuss these ‘shameful' matters with a frankness that sets them apart from their contemporaries. Robert Lowell and his students W.D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, “…forced a mutation of critical standards…”, Rosenthal said. The post-confessional poetry of the seventies and eighties continued to extrapolate on the themes that the confessional movement pioneered. Examples of post-confessional poems include Robert Pinsky‘s collection History of My Heart (1984), Bill Knott's poem The Closet (1983), and Donald Hall‘s Kicking the Leaves (1978). The content that the Confessional Poets explored laid the groundwork for much of the poetry that is being created in Masters of Fine Art (M.F.A.) programmes all over the country. The poets of this movement wrote unflinchingly about difficult topics. In contemporary poetry many poets are adopting the same mindset. These poets include Marie Howe, Sharon Olds, Judith Harris , and Jon Pineda. Popular confessional writing of today includes “Post Secret”, a project that asks individuals to submit an anonymous confessional postcard. The influence of confessional poetry has had a spillover effect. Now it has become popular to write memoirs about overcoming traumatic experiences and mental illnesses. Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life (1989), Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation (1994) and Dave Peltzer's A Child Called It (1995) are examples of contemporary confessional prose. However, while works like this are “celebrated for their extraordinary candour”, others, such as Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (2000) and Russell Brand's My Booky Wook (2009), are also “criticised for their perceived exhibitionist egotism,” and critic Bran Nicol compares this genre to reality TV. [email protected]
