Consuming the literary imagination for almost two decades, Confessional poetry ruptured the topical taboos of its time. Abortions, alcoholism, divorces, mental hospitals, suicide attempts -- nothing was sacred and everything was fair game. The Confessional poets created a disturbing, often autobiographical... [more]
Consuming the literary imagination for almost two decades, Confessional poetry ruptured the topical taboos of its time. Abortions, alcoholism, divorces, mental hospitals, suicide attempts -- nothing was sacred and everything was fair game.
The Confessional poets created a disturbing, often autobiographical poetic of pain that shocked the world with its raw anatomy of human suffering. Indebted to both Romantic poets and French Symbolists for their introspective ruminations on the darker realms, the movement dramatized everyday human angst with unsparing technical mastery, blurring boundaries between personal torment and political realities.
Anne Sexton explored her abortions and depression; Sylvia Plath charted her suicidal tendencies; Robert Lowell scrutinized his marital discord and emotional breakdowns. Confessional poetry's tone of guilt-ridden despair was not limited to the page. Sometimes called the "murderous art," the movement lost many of its practitioners to suicide, including poets John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton. The legacy of the Confessional poets lives on as a mode: the ultra-candid dissection of private distress. [show less]
A simple poem I wrote while I had writers block.
I began feeling that all my ideas were a line long and then nothing, which wound me up so much. Anyway, this ended up coming out.