OK: the simple answer is that confessional means you’re using content from your personal life to create the poem.
When poets such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton began writing poetry that turned the personal into the political, some male critics reacted with a sort of wounded revulsion. Eliot and W.H. Postwar social transformations – like the growth of corporations and the expansion of suburbs – seemed to corrupt Americans’ desire for autonomy and freedom. Confessional poetry or "Confessionalism" is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States during the 1950s. Like the time you accidentally hit a possum on the road and cried your eyes out. M. L. Rosenthal ‘first applied the term confession to Robert Lowell’s work’ (1). There was a surge in interest in psychology in the mid 20th century.
One definition of what makes a poem ‘confessional’ is offered by Irving Howe, who argues that a ‘confessional poem would seem to be one in which the writer speaks to the reader, telling him, without the mediating presence of imagined event or persona, something about his life’. Confessional Poetry and Mental Health. What is Confessional Poetry. Since we all know what a confession is, we can somewhat understand the tone that this kind of literature would convey… Confessional poetry, also known as confessionalism, is a poetic style that emerged in the US during the fifties.It is called the poetry of the personal or ‘I’ since it deals with extremely personal individual experience, the emotions, trauma, including subjects that were earlier considered as taboo. Confessional poetry was a way for writers to express their deep desires and thoughts in a more rational way, and to share those experiences with others who may be going through the same thing.
This genre of poetry shares certain characteristics.
Confessional poetry was a reaction to the depersonalized, academic poetry of writers like T.S. Confessional poetry is a category of poetry which is, in the broadest sense, exactly what the name implies. The debate suggests why confessional poetry’s blurring of distinctions between public and private worlds was freighted with social meaning that extended beyond matters of aesthetic value.
Confessional poetry is a modern poetic movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s in which the poet usually speaks directly to the reader without the voice of a separate persona. Auden, who wrote in the 1920s and 1930s. Our topic of this week's module deals with a deeper side of poetry that is said to have spawned within the late 1950's, and it is an era of poems said to be "confessional."
Death is a common topic and theme in the poetry of Anne Sexton, but when read in retrospect knowing that all this obsession was leading toward an act of self-destruction, the omnipresence of death takes on a greater symbolic meaning. These paragons of modernism believed poetry was a thing apart from its creator, and that there was no room for the self in poetry.