Reaction
Confessional free verse poetry became the popular approach in the second half of the 20th-century American poetry due, in large part, to the popularity of American poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Allen Ginsberg in the 1950s and 60s. However, this popularity resulted in something of a backlash in the 1970s and 1980s, leading some poets and entire poetry movements to go out of their way to avoid writing in the confessional mode.
For instance, one of the foremost poets of the Deep Image school, Robert Bly, was highly critical of what he perceived to be the solipsistic tendencies of Confessional poets. He referenced this aesthetic distaste when he praised the poet Antonio Machado, in the preface to his 1983 translation of Machado's poetry, Times Alone, for "his emphasis on the suffering of others rather than his own".
Other poetry movements that formed, in part, as a reaction to confessional poetry included the Language poets and the New Formalist poets.
Read more about this topic: Confessional Poetry
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