Reflection

History by Robert Lowell
Morning Song by Sylvia Plath
Her Kind by Anne Sexton
For The One Who Would Not Take His Life In His Hands by Delmore Schwartz
The Spring by Delmore Schwartz
The Truth the Dead Know by Anne Sexton
The End by Sharon Olds
Lady Lazarus by Sylvia Plath
The Reckoning by Theodore Roethke
In Those Years by Adrienne Rich


Confessional poetry is often seemed like dark human emotions put into words, creating painful story while I was reading it. All of the poems are raw and open in their explanation of what the poet is feeling or experiencing. All of the poems, however, were modernly written and did not have difficult rhyming schemes. They were almost full sentences and conversation from the poet. This made understanding and enjoying the poems much easier than I usually find poetry. My favorite poems came from Delmore Schwartz because of his intellectual references and the simplicity in the style they were written. His poems are written for the middleclass society in the way he explains everyday life. He connects human nature with ancient philosophers. This connection could possibly be to show how the flaws and nature of man has not changed from the thought’s of great philosopher. In our case, Schwartz plays the mediator by relaying our actions to prove how the philosopher’s thought were in fact right or wrong about man.

The imagery used in almost all of the poems are descriptions of natural, instinctive behavior. The ease each poem contains works well with the movement of confessional poetry. The languages are descriptively styled as in they would be part of conversation and each is the summarization of an emotional experience. “In Those Years” by Adrienne Rich the narrator describes the growing apart people face in their lives and how it seems a part of life, occurring in everyone’s life at one point or another. She begins to describe the separation and the person changing the reference from “we” to “I” as she shows separation through the poems language; “In those years, people will say, we lost track/ of the meaning of we, of you/ we found ourselves/reduced to I.” People often lose contact with each other unintentionally because of different lives and paths they take. The poem suggests that the different paths people take are due to the selfishness we all have towards our own life. Adrienne Rich’s honesty describes how although a group of people are together on their minds they have their own intentions in mind. The poem states, “They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and/pinions drove/along the show, through rages of fog/where we stood, saying I” conveying that although physically people are together their minds are acting as individuals and they see their path as their solo journeys.