Confessional Poetry - Development of Definition

Development of Definition

In 1959 M. L. Rosenthal first used the term "confessional" in a review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies entitled "Poetry as Confession", Rosenthal mentions earlier tendencies towards the confessional but notes how there was typically a "mask" THAT hid the poet's "actual face". He stated, "Lowell removes the mask. His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal."

Life Studies broke new ground. In a review of the book in The Kenyon Review, John Thompson wrote, "For these poems, the question of propriety no longer exists. They have made a conquest: what they have won is a major expansion of the territory of poetry." Nevertheless there were clear moves towards the confessional mode before the publication of Life Studies. Delmore Schwartz's confessional long poem Genesis had been published in 1943, and John Berryman had written a sonnet sequence in 1947 about an adulterous affair he'd had with a woman named Chris while he was married to his first wife, Eileen (however, since publishing the sonnets would have revealed the affair to his wife, Berryman didn't actually publish the sequence, titled Berryman's Sonnets, until 1967, after he divorced from his first wife). Berryman's sonnet sequence fits in the long tradition of highly personal sonnet sequences, stretching back through George Meredith's Modern Love to William Shakespeare's sonnets and the sonnets of Petrarch. Indeed, the impetus towards personal, autobiographical writing, dates back at least a century and a half before Life Studies. In February 1797 Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote in a letter to Thomas Poole: "I could inform the dullest author how he might write an interesting book — let him relate the events of his own life with honesty — not disguising the feelings that accompanied them."

However, the difference between the long tradition of intimate, personal, lyrical poetry and the confessional approach, lies in the shameful confidences that Rosenthal identified and which he said went "beyond customary bounds of reticence or personal embarrassment". In his 1955 poem Howl, Allen Ginsberg wrote that part of the purpose for writing his poetry was " stand before speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head."