Confessional Poetry

We are continuing the study of confessional poets in American Literature this week. We started with one of the most popular confessional poets, Robert Lowell. My homework for tonight is to read the work of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. They were both modern confessional poets.

I have enjoyed this semester of American Literature. Last semester I had American Lit to 1900, this semester it’s been 1900-present. I do like reading a lot of the older great literary works, but it is refreshing to be reading more modern work after having three courses where all we read was work from the 1800’s. I can relate more to the recent works than I could to stories that were written around the revolution, and the civil war.

I am kind of liking this confessional poetry genre. Thinking about it, much of the poetry written today can be seen as confessional poetry. Confessional poetry is really just when the poet writes in the first person(he or she is the narrator) and writes about subject matter in his or her own life. Most of the subject matter is depressing, which is why it was coined confessional poetry, because they are revealing things that most people would not reveal.

I don’t think that today it is really seen as confessional poetry when people write about the tough issues in their lives. These poets that I’ve been studying were the ones that broke the barriers. Now that they are broken, more and more people have been writing “confessional poetry”. This can be seen as positive of negative. In one aspect, more artists have the courage to express themselves. On the other hand, it may not be seen as brave anymore to reveal traumatic events when everyone else around you is also doing so.