Confessional Poetry History

Poetry which uses unflattering, honest, personal details of the poet’s own life. The topics of poems include childhood, sexuality, death, and sickness. It became a popular style of writing in the later 1950s to the early 1960s by poets Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W.D. Snodgrass. It had been untraditional to include such dark personal accounts of the poets life in the poem before. However, they were written in an autobiographical way which allowed many poets to released their trauma and depression. This was all evident while I read several of the poems from those poets. Before reading them I read a small summary of the poet's life and achievements and found that over half of them had committed suicide. The most apparent case of life influencing art is Sylvia Plath’s poem “Daddy” which describes her distant relationship with her father although he died when she was only eight. Many of the confessional poems I had read were written in such a conversational style due to the poets confession of their darkest experience as an autobiography. Many of Anne Sexton’s poems concentrate on the darkness of women and how everywoman experiences the same dark thoughts in each of them. This concentration comes from several years she spent depressed. As Sexton aged her mental illness became worst and her poems became morbid until she committed suicide.