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
Famous quotes containing the word reaction:
“Children, randomly at first, hit upon something sooner or later that is their mother’s and/or father’s Achilles’ heel, a kind of behavior that especially upsets, offends, irritates or embarrasses them. One parent dislikes name-calling, another teasing...another bathroom jokes. For the parents, this behavior my have ties back to their childhood, many have been something not allowed, forbidden, and when it appears in the child, it causes high-voltage reaction in the parent.”
—Ellen Galinsky (20th century)
“Sole and self-commanded works,
Fears not undermining days,
Grows by decays,
And, by the famous might that lurks
In reaction and recoil,
Makes flames to freeze, and ice to boil.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“In a land which is fully settled, most men must accept their local environment or try to change it by political means; only the exceptionally gifted or adventurous can leave to seek his fortune elsewhere. In America, on the other hand, to move on and make a fresh start somewhere else is still the normal reaction to dissatisfaction and failure.”
—W.H. (Wystan Hugh)