Impersonal Personalism: The Making of a Confessional Poetic

Author(s): Steven K. Hoffman

Source: ELH, Vol. 45, No. 4 (Winter, 1978), pp. 687-709
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
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IMPERSONAL PERSONALISM:
THE MAKING OF A CONFESSIONAL

POETIC

BY STEVEN K. HOFFMAN

When M. L. Rosenthal firstused the term "confessional" poetry

in reviewing Robert Lowell's Life Studies, he did so as a matterof
critical convenience to reflect both the autobiographical subject
matter of the poetry and its connection, however undefined, to a
similar impulse in the literary tradition from Augustine to
Wordsworthand Whitman. Rosenthal's doubts about the suitability
of the term, implicit even in this initial statement,surfaced in an
expanded discussion of the phenomenon in The New Poets: "It was
a term both helpful and too limited, and very possibly the conception of a confessional school has by now done a certain amount of
damage."' Unfortunately,his fearshave been fullyjustified, forthe
label is now a major stumbling block. To those who have chosen to
attackthe mode on fundamentalgrounds,the termconjured visions
of the kind of solipsistic self-advertisementdisparaged by Eliot and
his heirs, and has thereforebecome a token of derision or outright
contempt. Equally burdened by an all too literal application, even
the movement's defenders have been forcedinto a quandary: either
to glorifythe courageousness of self-explorationin the face of grave
psychic risks,and its potentially therapeutic value, or to rise to the
righteous defense of a particular favored poet against the ominous
taint of the label.2 The poets themselves have had to resortto unnecessarily elaborate defenses when, in point of fact,none of the
major confessionals-Lowell, Berryman,Roethke, Ginsberg, Snodgrass, Sexton, Plath, and the originator of the mode, Delmore
Schwartz-are solely "confessional" in the limited and generally
pejorative sense thathas gained such wide currency.3An inevitable
counterattackagainst earlier formulations,begun in the mid 1960's,
has centered on the quest for new but no more adequate labels,
including Alvarez's "extremist" poetry, Monroe Spears' "open
poetry, and Marjorie Perloff's"documentary" verse.4
It is not the purpose of this essay, however, to enlist in the dubious pursuit of less offensiveterminologybut to delve beneath imprecation to consider confessional poetry as poetry; indeed, as a
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definable poetic. Without underestimatingthe wide range of individual styles and talents represented, it is still possible to abstract
certain characteristicsfundamental to all of their work. If they do
not properly comprise a literaryschool, with all the qualifications
attendantto that designation, they do make up a distincthistorical
movement firmlyrooted in both the Romantic and modern traditions. Contemporary confessional poetry is a phenomenon that
synthesizes the inclination to personalism and consciousness building of the nineteenth century with the elaborate masking
techniques and objectifications of the twentieth, a phenomenon
which, under the veneer of self-absorptionunprecedented even
among the Romantics, makes notable inroads into myth and archetype, as well as social, political, and cultural historiography
characteristic of high modernism. Finally, the movement is very
much a product of its own age, the troubled war years-both "hot"
and "cold" extending fromthe late 1930's when Schwartz published In Dreams Begin Responsibilities (1938) throughthe Vietnam era that forms the backdrop for the last major confessional
opus, Lowell's Notebook (1970), a period typifiedby a deficiency in
shared public values and manifest threats to the very concept of
individuality comparable to that which accompanied the violent
turnof the French Revolution and the "Waste Land" period following World War I. The poetic climate created by these conditions is
precisely the subject of Schwartz's influential "The Isolation of
Modern Poetry,"an essay thatprovided the theoreticaljustification
forthe confessional movement:
It became increasingly
impossibleforthepoettowriteaboutthe
lives ofothermen;fornotonlywas he removedfromtheirlives,
but,above all, thecultureand the sensibilitywhichmade hima
poet could notbe employedwhentheproposedsubjectwas the
lives of humanbeings in whomcultureand sensibilityhad no

organic function.. . . Since the only life available to the poet as a

manofculturehas been thecultivation

ofhisownsensibility,
that
is theonlysubjectavailableto him,ifwe mayassumethata poet
can onlywriteaboutsubjectsofwhichhe has an absorbingexperience in everyway.5

From a broad historical standpoint,the roots of the confessional

mode are in the great Romantic lyrics and personal epicsWordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and "The Prelude," Coleridge's
"Dejection Ode," Whitman's "Song of Myself," much of Shelley
and Byron, and even such heavily mythologized works as Keats'
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"Fall of Hyperion" -which M. H. Abrams has variously termed the

"Greater Romantic Lyric" and the "crisis autobiography" and,
highlighting the continuity with earlier meditative/descriptive
verse, Robert Langbaum, the "poetry of experience."6 Common to
all are three basic attributes,the firstof which is the prevalence of a
dramatic element in what is essentially a lyric utterance. The
"poetry of experience," for instance, involves "a character in a
dramatic action, a character who has been endowed by the poet
with the qualities necessary to make the poem happen to him" (The
Poetry of Experience, p. 52). The second unifyingfeature, quite
obviously, is the rather explicit autobiographical connection, due
less to the use of the firstperson than the apparent convergence of
the poetic action with the externally documented life of the poet,
with primary emphasis placed on moments of emotional and
philosophical crisis. Yet as Abrams convincingly argues in Natural
Supernaturalism, the Romantics were well within clearly marked
traditions, predominantly aesthetic and eschatological in nature,
which, oftento a greater extent than purely factual considerations,
determined overall structureas well as the placement, even the
choice of specific dramatic incidents designed forthe highest emotional impact. The entire poeticized experience, then, serves ultimately as both the epitome of a broader cultural experience and
an essentially evangelical paradigm forsuccessful personal adaptation to, and usually transcendence of the circumstances of the age,
which is offered to the reader for his edification and profitable
emulation: "In other words, the theodicy of the private life ...
belongs to the distinctive genre of the Bildungsgeschichte, which
translates the painful process of Christian conversion and redemption into a painful process of self-formation, crisis, and selfrecognition, which culminates in a stage of self-coherence, selfawareness, and assured power that is its own reward" (Natural
Supernaturalism, p. 96).
As will be demonstrated below, all of these Romantic attributes
are importantaspects of the confessional poem. But it would be a
serious mistake to envision an unbroken line connecting them. Despite the radical personalism of Wordsworth's "The Prelude" and
virtually the entire Whitman canon, neither poet approaches the
minute autobiographical particularityof the confessionals, the almost numbing rehearsal of family conflict,severe emotional imbalance, and the difficultiesin everyday living; neither so consistently or in such copious detail affordsus entryinto the marriage
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bed, the asylum, or the detoxification ward. Given confessional

absorption in the often sordid and certainly "unpoetic" aspects of
life, it is not surprisingthat,with the exception of certain visionary
moments in Ginsberg, Roethke, and Plath-themselves very often
equivocal-the contemporarypoets renounced the bardic impulse
of their forbears. Naturally this shiftin point of view has had an
effecton the tone of the speaking voice, a subject treated in George
Wright'scogent study of literarypersona, The Poet in the Poem. In
contradistinction to the confessional protagonist who, mired in
seemingly insoluble difficulties,typically functions close to the
level of the reader and whose occasional rhetorical flightsare almost always ambiguous, if not simply ironic, the Romantic "becomes a hero as well as a protagonist. His speech accordingly becomes superb. He addresses the reader from a height that the
reader can only dream of attaining. . . . Conscious of the superiority
of his experience and capabilities, the persona must speak in elevated language, continually passionate, continually above the usual
level of his audience."7 While the reader's relationship to the poem
is a matterof great concern forboth groups, the mechanics of that
relationship have significantlyaltered.
Thus if a confessional movement is in many ways unthinkable
without its Romantic background, there is a considerable gulf between the two, a gulf which is bridged by the peculiarly modern
version of the "poetry of experience," which, according to
Langbaum, is a continuation of the dramatic impulse evident
among the Romantics but only as it passes throughthe intervening
embellishments of Browning. The tendency to anchor personal, if
not explicitly autobiographical experience in fully developed dramatic incidents is a significantlink between the principal European
and American modernists, Baudelaire, Yeats, Eliot, Pound, Williams, and later Auden, all of whom won high praise fromSchwartz
fortheirability to evoke dramatically"the attitudesand emotions of
a human being in a given situation."8 Due also in part to Pound's
desire to expand the province of poetry to include more of the
breadth of prose-itself a reaction to the high achievements in the
novel by Stendhal, Flaubert, Proust, Joyce, and the Great Russian
realists-modern dramatic verse deviates fromthe Romantic on a
number of significantgrounds,only one of which is the tendency to
draw charactersapparently not to be equated with the poet himself.
Above all is the willingness, so vital to the advent of confessionalism, to treat the unpoetic material present in abundance in
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modern urban life without the Wordsworthian compulsion to

spiritualize the mundane or even to dignifyit beyond its essential
worth. Thus the trivial people and tedious routines of Boston and
London in Eliot's Prufrockand Other Observations (1917) remain
so, the working class ethnics of Williams do not rise above themselves, and Yeats' "paudeen" shopkeepers merely exemplify the
gray average of twentieth century existence. As a consequence of
this renewed poetic effortto take reality on its own terms,the personae ofthe poems, even when nominally the poets themselves, lay
no claim to the "extraordinaryperspective" so pervasive in the
Romantic period. Quite to the contrary, according to George
Wright; the ambivalent, limited modern protagonist,like Browning's, tends to be "rather like other men, perhaps just enough more
perceptive than they to feel his insights and experiences are worth
recording.... The modern persona has become a representative
ratherthan an ideal man" (The Poet in the Poem, p. 53). Again, Eliot
appears to be central in this regard. The protagonists of his early
associational dramas, "Prufrock" himself and the unnamed focal
figuresin "Portraitof a Lady," "Rhapsody on a Windy Night," and
"Preludes," struggle interminablyand with a notable lack of success against internal dislocation and incipient breakdown and the
increasingly ominous threatsfromthe urban environment,itselfan
effectivepsychescape of dislocation and decay. There are, in fact,
strikingand hardly coincidental similarities betwen these poems
and later "confessions" ofpersonal and cultural anguish, not only in
subject matterbut also their characteristicmanner of presentation:
the collage effect,ironic allusiveness, and linguistic variation,all of
which is undergirded by a foundation of plain colloquial speech.
Obviously the major obstacle to claiming Eliot as a direct precursorofthe confessionals has been his insidious public role, firmly
established in "Tradition and the Individual Talent," as the champion of poetic impersonality: "Poetry is not a turningloose of emotion, but an escape fromemotion; it is not the expression of personality,but an escape frompersonality.But, of course, only those who
have personality and emotion know what it means to want to escape from these things" (my italics). However, focusing on the
italicized passage and similar statementshere and in other essays,
recent commentators on this once unassailable doctrine have determined that personality does have a place in Eliot's poetic, if
properly objectified and thereby transformed,and so does strong
personal feeling, again if shaped aesthetically by means of the obSteven K. Hoffman

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jective correlative. Both procedures are in factcentral to an understanding of the best confessional poetry. But even if with the benefit of hindsight such comparatively recent views of Eliot make
his poetic theory less hostile, and perhaps conducive to a confessional poetic, ifwe now see more clearly the verypersonal material
imbedded in "Prufrock,""Portraitof a Lady," and especially "The
Waste Land," it must be admitted that the firstgeneration of confessionals by and large took him at his word, at least until they had
already begun to manipulate autobiographical materials on their
own.9
The widespread literal acceptance of Eliot's pronouncements
notwithstanding,ample precedent for a confessional poetic was
available in the worksof othermajor modernists.Althoughhe substituted cityscape for landscape, Auden, another reputed kingpin of
impersonality, drew directly on the Romantic meditative/
descriptive formatfor several poems in his earliest collections. Of
special note is "1929," in which the characteristically "Audenesque" spokesman-the anxious, ironic, politically sophisticated
period figure-is based on a virtual facsimile of the poet himself
musing on very personal experiences in prewar Germany, even to
the point of naming names, and the powerful feelings they engendered. Williams' early vignettes of everyday American life are also
interspersed with dramatic interludes along the lines of "Danse
Russe" which delve beneath the public mask of the imperturbably
good hearted "happy genius" to tap a deeply private current of
loneliness and quiet desperation: "'I am lonely, lonely. / I was
born to be lonely, / I am best so!'"
No members of the modernist mainstream,however, are as important to the confessional movement as W. B. Yeats and Ezra
Pound. The relevant Yeats, the Yeats who had removed the "coat /
Covered with embroideries / Of old mythologies" to find "there's
more enterprise / In walking naked," is to be seen in the disappointed lover and acerbic social critic of the middle period, the
often splenetic broken sensibility in the opening movements of
"Among School Children" and "Sailing to Byzantium," and certainly the "wild old wicked man" of Last Poems. Granted, the descent fromthe netherworldofthe Celtic Twilight to the "the foulragand-bone shop of the heart" was never as simple as that. The new
candor was ever complicated by its place in the new mythologyofA
Vision; "personal utterance" was consistentlyfilteredthroughthe
anti-self or mask. Yet a critical aspect of the later poetry,and cer692

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tainly one reason forits lasting appeal, is the appearance, however

masked and mythologized,of the worldly,contingentside of Yeats'
complex poetic personality. Though stripped of its dense esoteric
underpinnings, it is this presence, one which moved Roethke to
comment in his journal, "When he ran out of material, Yeats invented himself,"'10that exerted a powerful influence not only on
Roethke but also Plath and, to a lesser extent, Berryman. Pound's
personal life, a shadowy presence in much of Personae, also comes
to fullerview in "Hugh Selwyn Mauberly," which, in its occasionally overlapping axes of Mauberly and "EP," has something of the
Yeatsian self/anti-selfdialectic, and particularly the Cantos-to
Berryman,"Only apparently a historical or philosophical epic, actually a personal epic."" Nowhere does Pound himself appear
closer to the surface than in the Pisan Cantos, the brilliant section
with the heaviest concentrationof distinctlyautobiographical indices, drawn both fromthe incarceration experience itselfand better
days in London and Paris. If nothing else, the personal nodes that
appear almost surrealistically,come to momentaryfocus, and then
are swept away in the torrentof images and ideas streamingfrom
the multifaceted intelligence that orchestrates the proceedings
provide the experiential ballast and emotional depth too oftenlacking in a work that tends toward disembodied cerebration.
These, then, are the precedents, both Romantic and modern, that
underlie the confessional movement, the pivotal figure in which
was Delmore Schwartz. Beginning with the widely acclaimed short
story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities," Schwartz produced a
series of works that established the central confessional direction,
an oftenwrylyrealistic depiction of autobiographical incident typically involving a remembrance ofthingspast. This is the focal point
forShenandoah (1941), a closet drama of identity;Genesis (1943), a
massive personal and familial narrativewith verse explication; and
the early lyrics "In The Naked Bed, In Plato's Cave," an Eliotic
evocation of midnight angst; "Calmly We Walk This April's Day,"
an Audenesque descriptive meditation on the dissolution of family
unity and personal confidence; and "Ballad of the Children of the
Czar," a Yeatsian examination of an imprisoningfamilyheritage, all
of which were collected in his firstpublished volume. While the
confessional rubric must be applied loosely enough to embrace
Lowell's realistic and documentaryanecdotes, Roethke's surrealistic sequences, and Berryman's expressionistic experiments in lanSteven K. Hoffman

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guage, its essential nucleus is always its dramaticelement, or drama

in combination with narrative,whether it be the drama of discrete,
separate incidents as in Life Studies, the unified sequences of The
Lost Son, or an entire volume, viz., The Dream Songs. The individual poem most commonly includes a specified concrete premise
or environment,albeit a highly ellipitcal one in much of Roethke
and Berryman,a definable character or characters, purposeful action, and, however ambiguous, resolution. Thus, to a point, A. R.
Jones' attemptat definitionin "Necessity and Freedom: The Poetry
of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton," one of the earliest efforts[1965] to codify the issue, is a useful one: the confessional poem, to Jones, is a "dramatic monologue in which the persona is not treated dramatically,as a mask that is, in the manner of
Browning's Dramatis Personae, but is projected lyrically, as in
Whitman's Song of Myself or Pound's Pisan Cantos. In otherwords,
although the poem's style is unmistakably dramatic,the persona is
naked ego involved in a very personal world and with particular
private experience" (p. 18). Postponing forthe moment the issue of
"naked ego," one mightadd thatthe dramaticnature ofthe poem not
only lends aesthetic and essentially public shape to inchoate emotional material but also allows necessary aesthetic distance. Such is
the essence of Roethke's advice to fledgling poets in his journals, a
principle designed to please the strictestEliotic critic and one undoubtedly applied in his own verse: "Don't be afraidofthe dramatic
poem. There you don't have to 'think' and you can stand one step
away fromyourcozy littleselves, on occasion" (Strawfor the Fire, p.
176).
To assume that the poetic voice is the "naked ego" of the poet
himself rather than a carefully constructed aesthetic entity-and
here "Prufrock" definitely comes to mind-is surely to underestimate the considerable artistictalent represented by the confessionals and the degree to which pure invention dominates their work.
Indeed, the balance of the poem's autobiographical impact is an
illusion, what Lowell properly called in the retrospectiveDolphin
(1973) poem "Heavy Breathing," "the fiction I colored with firsthand evidence." So great is the temptationin considering the mode
to accept its fictive elements as literal fact and thereby identifyat
virtuallyevery point the poet and his persona that even the confessionals themselves have fallen prey to it. Note, for instance, the
self-correctivenature of Berryman's comments on "Skunk Hour":
"For convenience in exposition with a poem so personal, I have
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been pretending that 'I' is the poet, but of course the speaker can
never be the actual writer,who is a person with an address, a social
security number, expectations.. .. The necessity for the artist of
reflection opens inevitably an abyss between his person and his
persona. I only said that much poetry is 'very closely about' the
person. The persona looks across at the person and then sets about
its own work" (The Freedom of the Poet, p. 321). Allowing for
differences in degree but certainly not in kind, the best confessional poetry preserves Eliot's distinctionbetween the "man who
suffers"and "the mind which creates." Particularlypatent examples can be found in Delmore Schwartz's earliest work, in which
the Schwartzian likenesses-the troubled insomniacs and family
historians-are always distinct from the evaluative intelligence
which, reminiscentof Eliot's, has at its disposal the historyof Western thoughtfromAristotleon. The most strikingapplication of this
bifurcationis in the chorus of "Voices" which explicate Genesis,
but it is also evident in the notable shiftin both tone and manner of
address which concludes and summarizes the compelling anxiety
of "In The Naked Bed, In Plato's Cave": "Oh son of man, the
ignorantnight,the travail/Of early morning,the mysteryof beginning /Again and again."
Perhaps the most notable confessional voice construction is
Henry, the spokesman forThe Dream Songs, actually a constantly
modulating collection of voices, only one of which is close to Berryman'sown, constructedalong the lines ofthe echoic structuresof
"The Waste Land"s and the Cantos. Capable of a wide range of
roles, the protagonist is above all a skillful linguistic and orthographic construct, blending almost equal amounts of traditional
rhetoric,Joycean puns and ellipses, minstrel showmanship, black
street dialect, various species of American slang and sexual argot,
and baby talk; in short,an entire vaudeville of one. Even the oft
criticized Love & Fame protagonistis a combination of at least two
distinctvoices: a distastefullyjejune braggartwho controlsthe first
sections of the volume and a desperately humble, self-lacerating
older man who surfaces frequentlyin the firsthalf and dominates
the second. The other major confessionals are also known by and
oftenconfused with their explicitly literarypersonae. With the aid
of JenijoyLaBelle's splendid study of Roethke's sources The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke (1976), we can now see more clearly
the scrupulous care with which he constructedthe distinctivevoice
of "The Lost Son" and Praise to the End! frompassages of Yeatsian
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rage, Whitmanic celebration, and Wordsworthian expansiveness

graftedonto the characteristicidioms of the so-called "mad" poets
Blake, Smart, and Clare, the frenetic natural energy of Dylan
Thomas, the bounce of Mother Goose, and the quiet contemplative
rhythmsof Eliot and Vaughan. Lowell too fused a unique and multifaceted aesthetic personality in Life Studies by drawing on the
New England colloquialism of Frost,the understated ironyof Ransom, the matterof factobjectivityof Bishop, Jarrell,and his prose
sources, and, particularlyforthe pumped up "Cock of the Walk" in
"Waking in the Blue," the manic/depressiveenergy of Berryman's
"Nervous Songs." All, of course, culminate in the hauntingconclusion to "Skunk Hour",with its explicit echoes of H6lderlin, Milton,
and St. John of the Cross. Finally there is Plath, the most consistentlystylized and elaborately masked of the confessionals, whose
theatrical repertoire ranges from the downtrodden little girl of
"Daddy" to the long sufferingChrist of "Fever 103'," the avenging
bitch goddess of "Lady Lazarus," and the distantregal queen ofthe
bee poems. In a sense "Edge," one of several Ariel poems usually
ascribed to the suicidal urge, also summarizes this issue. Contrary
to Plath herself,the flawed being with "an address, a social security
number, expectations," "This woman," her literarycounterpart,
is perfected
Her dead
Bodywearsthe smileofaccomplishment,
The illusionofa Greeknecessity
Flows in the scrollsofhertoga.
In the process of findinga suitable public voice, no easy proposition as the verse of such recent heirs ofthe movement as Erica Jong
will attest,the confessional also applies his craftsmanshipto the
experiences thatare to be described, particularlythe broad reaches
of personal emotional turmoil.Critics like Alvarez are undoubtedly
correctin emphasizing the unconscious motivationformost confessional poetry-indeed, the ultimate source forall great art-but too
easily lose sight of the crucial and explicitlyconscious activities of
selection and arrangement. For the confessionals as for all accomplished poets, the immersion in experience is not in itself
poetry; rather,that experience must be transformedinto images,
the images into rhythmicpatterns,the patterns,finally,into dramatically convincing poetic incidents which become the joint possession ofpoet and reader. That this idealized process is pertinentmay
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be illustratedby examples fromeach of the main confessional lines.

Among the surrealists,one firstturns to the introductory"Flight"
section of Roethke's "The Lost Son," in its suggestion of incipient
emotional breakdown a representative confessional effort,to find
that experience rendered as a dramatic actuality.Every device contributes to the progressive descent into irrationality:the rhythms
themselves-hortatory and staccato at first,incantatoryat the end;
the series of questions and their mysterious answers; the ghostly
shapes and echoes; and the climactic shock ofthe final line's harsh,
merciless consonants:
Voice, come out ofthe silence.
Say something.
Appearin the formofa spider
Or a mothbeatingthe curtain.
Tell me:
Whichis the way I take;
Out ofwhatdoor do I go,
Whereand to whom?
Dark hollows said, lee to the wind,
The moon said, back of an eel,
The salt said, look by the sea,
Yourtearsare notenoughpraise,
here
You will findno comfort
In the kingdomofbang and blab.
Similar achievements are to be found in Plath's "Fever 103o,." in
which the oppressive weight of family responsibility and male
dominance is made terrifyinglyavailable through claustrophobic
shortlines and images of discomfitinghigh fever,Isadora Duncan's
strangulation,and choking "yellow sullen smokes" which "Make
their own element" and "will not rise," or in Sexton's "Ringing the
Bells," wherein ominously repetitive nursery rhyme rhythms
evoke the regressive natureand barely controlled terrorofadvanced
mental illness.
Among the confessional realists, Lowell's metonymicjuxtaposition of concrete objects, so persuasively treated in Perloff's The
Poetic Art of Robert Lowell, is the primarymeans forthe objectification of personal feeling. Well versed in the Lowellian mode,
Snodgrass connoted the emotionally wrenching process of divorce
in the "Heart's Needle" sequence through images of the natural
landscape: the newly liberated fatherreflected in the ambiguous
"hungry bank swallow /flauntinghis free /flight"; the overprotecSteven K. Hoffman

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tive wife, a "red- / winged blackbird which "shrieked, slapping

frailwings, /diving at my head"; and the painful separation froma
daughterimplicit in tree branches first"wrenched in the shattering
wind" then "hackjed] free" by chain saws. Ginsberg's "Sunflower
Sutra" is also reminiscent of Lowell, and Eliot, in that the poet
finds metaphors forpersonal crisis in the disconnected and decaying flotsam of a junkyard, particularlya sunflower, "a dead gray
shadow ... big as a man." In his own inimitable style,Berrymantoo
transfiguredhis private traumas into objective shapes, projecting
the terrorof detoxification into the grotesque religious ritual of
Dream Song 202 ("With shining strides hear his redeemer come")
and a lament for a fatherdead by his own hand in the movingly
elliptical Dream Song 29, in which tortuouslyinverted syntaxand
heavy alliterationprovide rich emotional inference:
There sat downonce, a thingon Henry'sheart
so heavy,ifhe had a hundredyears
& more,& weeping,sleepless,in all themtime
Henrycould notmakegood.
For the most part, then, the confessionals actually held to the
specific caveats of "Tradition and the Individual Talent"; farfrom
loosing a torrentof personal feeling, they offeremotion fused to
images and objectified or "structural emotion, provided by the
drama." Given theirratherfree sense of autobiographical factuality,
they do express a "medium"' and only indirectlya personality. Of
course this is not to imply that they are wholly free of legitimate
censure. When the crucial shaping power is absent, when, in
Robert Phillips' somewhat excessive criticismof Berrymanin The
Confessional Poets, they fail to "see throughthe personal experience to the poetic one"- a judgment thatcan be broughtto the late
work of Schwartz, Sexton, and Ginsberg-the verse does become
slack and self-indulgentand deserves the criticalhostilitytoo often
applied in broad strokesto the entire confessional canon.
But even those criticswilling to grantthe successful translationof
private to poetic experience have been slow to recognize the extent
to which the process also transformsan individual issue into one of
general import.Not since the great Romantics has a group of poets
so consistentlybeen burdened by accusations of poetic solipsism;
yet the confessionals as a group maintain the traditional artistic
commitmentto truth,"truth,"as Anne Sexton tells us, "that goes
beyond the immediate self, another life."'2 The typical persona in
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these poems, like that of the Romantics, tends to bear the accumulated ills of his age, and the poem itself is the medium through
which these mattersare summarized, intensified,and made dramatically available to the reader. Like the moderns, however, the confessional protagonist lacks the heroic qualities necessary to rise
completely above conditions; thereforehis affirmativecapability is
characteristicallymuted and ambivalent. Seen in this light, Berryman's heretoforepuzzling comment in Dream Song 366 takes on
added clarity: "These Songs are not meant to be understood, you
understand. /They are meant to terrify& comfort."What is terrifying about the confessional poem is precisely its immersion in the
primaryexistential conditions of life at any time and also in specifically modern difficulties.
Schwartz's poetry is the most direct manifestationof the confessional concern with our common human plight. The primarypurpose forthe explicatorypassages in all of his work, culminating in
the chorus of commentatorsin Genesis, is, in the words of Shenandoah, to forcethe reader to "see the particularas universal," even at
the cost of purely aesthetic considerations. Through the cumulative
insights of the Genesis "Voices," numbered among whom are Aristotle, Kant, Marx, Freud, and the existentialists,the life of Hershey
Green, particularlythe manifestdifficultiesof achieving an acceptable identity, is put forthas the epitome of the life of his age.
Equally open in his intentions is Allen Ginsberg, many of whose
poems are implicitly constructed along the lines of the "Sutra" or
sermon explicitly represented by "Sunflower Sutra." Here the
analogue forthe "broken" and "battered" consciousness of the persona is the equally dislocated and Moloch dominated junkyard
America, the focal point for which is a rusting locomotive, "the
specter of a once powerful mad American locomotive," the essence
of national promise.
If the others do not have such explicit designs upon us, and
thereby either severely circumscribe or entirelyeliminate internal
commentary,they nonetheless share the same basic impulse. In
many ways the exemplary confessional, Lowell "uses his intense
self-explorationsin Life Studies as a source of metaphors forunderstanding aspects of the public world."'13 In "Skunk Hour," forinstance, the multiple ills of the persona treated in the final four
stanzas-the personal isolation and internal discord, the failures in
love, the sense of being cut offfromnatural life and burdened by a
decaying hierarchical past, and the lack of viable external religious
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props-are all implicit in the wider social scene depicted in the first
four. Even the climactic Satanic statement, "I myself am hell,"
corresponds directlyto an earlier general proposition,"the season's
ill." The implicit interchange between private and public realms
throughoutLife Studies, with its incisive analysis of the "tranquilized" and oppressively impersonal "Fifties,"' anticipates not
only the direct linkage of the two in the more patently "public"
poems of For the Union Dead (1964), Near the Ocean (1967), and
Notebook (1970) but also analogous effortson the partof Snodgrass,
Sexton, and Plath. Once again, Snodgrass is closest to Lowell in that
he used the familyportraitsof Remains (1969) as images forthe
dynamics, or more properly the lack of a dynamic in modern mass
society. The same imprisoningand impersonalizing forces evident
in the non-confessional "Lobsters in the Window," an examination
of the undifferentiatedcrowd, are at work in "Survivors a vision
of the mausoleum atmosphere, "dark and still," of the familyhome,
whose denizens, the living dead, "brush togetherand do not feel
lust, / Hope, rage, love." To much the same effect,Sexton drew on
Lowell's use of the mental hospital as social microcosm in both
"Ringing the Bells" and "Flee on Your Donkey" (Live or Die). The
latterdepicts a sordid portraitof humanitynumbed by "tranquilizers, insulin, or shock," regimented by the "Dinn" of mindless
routine,and ultimatelyreduced to the "X's" ofthe hospital register,
minds rotting"like black bananas," hearts "grown flat as dinner
plates." In Plath's work the "flattening" of individuality to an insentient average is due to the pressure imposed by that peculiarly
modern mechanistic horror,the "Panzer-man" of "Daddy," the ultimate manifestationof which is the Hiroshima image of "Fever
1030." Here the stifling"sullen smokes" thatconnote the persona's
repressed selfhood also "trundle round the globe / Choking the
aged and the meek, /The weak," thus signifyingthe common fateof
a victimized world.
The human predicament is also the essential subject in Berryman
and Roethke but is broached in two distinctlydifferentmanners.
However personal in detail, The Dream Songs, like the Pisan Cantos and Genesis, is, in its overall effect,very much a portraitof a
specified historicalperiod and its characteristicanxieties. If Henry
can never be completely detached fromBerryman himself, he is
also the mind ofthatage, to be identifiedin particularwith all ofthe
isolated and oppressed segments of society whose representative
speech patternshe adopts. Ultimately,"at odds wifde world and its
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god," he speaks forall of us, or at least a high percentage of us, as

"Mr Heartbreak,the New Man" of Dream Song 5 who findshimself
unwittinglysnarled "in de netting" of a nightmarishexistence, the
chief identifiable agent of which is "the brainfeverbird." Roethke,
on the other hand, remains closest to his Romantic forbearsin the
assumption of archetypal poetic roles. The confessional journey
detailed in The Lost Son and Praise to the End! moves hardly at all
in an identifiable social world but in the realm of the greenhouse
and its environs, an impressively elastic symbolic milieu, both
womb and tomb,personal and collective unconscious, prelapsarian
ordered garden and chaotic, violent hell. Thanks in large part to
Kenneth Burke's seminal contributionsto Roethke scholarship, we
can now pinpoint various stages in this complexly interwoven and
exceedingly painful physiological, psychological, and spiritual
progression and, withthe aid of Maud Bodkin, and throughher Jung,
interpret,although never with complete certainty,the specific import of the various disembodied murmursand luminous shapes that
make up the landscape ofthe three major interrelatedsequences, the
Greenhouse, "The Lost Son," and "Where Knock Is Open Wide."
For our purposes here it is sufficientto say thatin theirconnection to
literaryhistory,Jungian psychology, quasi-Christian theology, and
ancient vegetative myth,these poetic experiences pass almost immediately froma specified individual consciousness into the imagination of the race.
Given the abundant terrifyingaspects of the confessional world
view, Berryman's assertion that there is comfortin the poems may
be subject to considerable doubt. As heirs of the "Waste Land" and
citizens of the modern world, the poets accepted the a priori failure
of their culture to sustain viable human life. Yet, more importantly,
as part of a continuing Romantic tradition,they shared as an ideal
the impulse discussed at length in Natural Supernaturalism to heal
the divisions existing within the individual self and between that
self and others and its environment. Of these responsibilities, the
confessionals have been most successful at the first,and herein lies
the "ccomfort"their poems provide us. In the same works that recreate aspects of the contingent world and thus detail the myriad
threatsto individualityimplicit in it,the poets are also involved in a
painstakingconstructionof a self to assert against them.14Granted,it
is a distinctlymodern version of the self loosely based, as Schwartz
tells us in Genesis, on the existentialistconcept of "Being-in-theworld" (cf. Heidegger's Daesein) so prevalent in the American intelSteven K. Hoffman

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lectual climate of the 1950's and, with the possible exception of

Ginsberg's, very far indeed fromthe world swallowing "Imperial
Self" ofthe American Renaissance. But keeping in mind the hostile
environmentsof the poems themselves, the depersonalized age in
which they were written,and the degree to which the confessionals
expanded the province of self to include the uncharted regions of
the preconscious and unconscious, it is nonetheless a significant
aesthetic achievement. Because each poem is a discrete stage in the
development of a multifaceted self, that self has an independent
existence, a tangible literaryhistoricity.In addition, it is the ongoing process of development, along with the autobiographical connection that lends "authenticity" to it, that most completely involves the reader. In this respect the confessional has a potentially
salutary effecton his audience analogous to that of the Romantic
exemplars of the "poetry of experience," in whose work "the autobiographical illusion is .. . importantas precisely the plot-a plot
about the self-development of an individual with whom the reader
can identifyhimself to make the poem an incident in his own selfdevelopment as well. For the poetry of experience is, in its meaning if not its events, autobiography both for the writer and the
reader" (The Poetry of Experience, p. 52).
In that the confessionals constructtheir literaryselves virtually
fromthe ground up, fromanonymity,extreme dissociation, or imprisonment in external forms,the characteristicmovement of their
poems is, as Jarrell noted in Lowell's early work, fromnecessity
and entrapment to qualified liberation. Again Lowell's "Skunk
Hour" epitomizes the initial stage of development. Lost in a ruined
landscape, the isolated persona is faced with a similar deterioration
of his own personalitywhich approaches absolute negation: "I hear
/ my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its
throat." However, at the very point he takes upon himselfthe damnation of his world with the Miltonic "I myselfam hell," an emotional turn upward occurs, signalled by the admittedly ambiguous
skunks. Though completely unreflective and bestial, these creatures are indicative of a minimal animal self-assertiveness and
commitmentto survival; they have the instinctsnecessary to derive
sustenance fromthe little the world will offerand, moreover,"will
not scare." In identifyinghimselfwith these lower formsof life,the
persona indeed deprives himselfof certain aspects of his humanity,
but this is an essential firststep toward regaining a fullersense of it.
Thus, though the poem is properlyplaced at the end of this magnif702

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icently ordered volume as the culmination of a gradual erosion of

personality, it is at the same time the spark for a hitherto stifled
"agonizing reappraisal" of the constituentelements of self, including its roots in the personal and familial past, which carries us back
into Life Studies and forward to For the Union Dead, Near the
Ocean, and the Notebook group.
In much the same manner, Schwartz's canon officiallybegins in
"In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" with an "anonymous" figure
who, by reviewing the past, achieves a sense of identityconsonant
with his twenty-first
birthday.Similarly,Snodgrass' Heart's Needle,
which opens in "Returned to Frisco, 1946" with its narratormerely
one amidst the crowd, "shouldered like pigs along the rail,"

climaxes

in "These

Trees

Stand

..."

with Adamic self-naming

("Snodgrass is walking throughthe universe"), and culminates in a

much firmerhold on a unique personalityin the fine title sequence.
So too do Roethke's major confessional sequences originate either
at the point of biological inception ("Cuttings," "Where Knock Is
Open Wide") or in the dissolution of an unsatisfactoryguilt-ridden
ego ("The Lost Son"), and Berryman'sDream Songs with a sulking
"HuffyHenry," who, while temporarilyincommunicado and essentially selfless, is soon to be "pried open forall the world to see."
Turning to individual poems, one finds a remarkable degree of
uniformity.Sexton's "Flee on Your Donkey" protagonistdoes make
her escape fromthe stultifyingworld of the hospital, "the same old
crowd /the same ruined scene," by means of a "hairy beast," one of
the "sweet dark playthings" dredged fromthe unconscious during
intense self-examination; Ginsberg's spokesman in "Sunflower
Sutra" eventually reaches a renewed appreciation forthe spiritual
essence of his identityby meditating the Blakeian sunflower; and
Plath's "Fever 103O""heroine puts offthe "old whore petticoats" of
limiting social roles and fans fromthe "yellow sullen smokes" of
subjugation the "pure acetylene /Virgin" of triumphantindividuality. In so doing, her apotheosis becomes a "lantern" capable of
illuminating the path to be taken by other suppressed selves both
inside and outside the confines of the poem.
While the confessional effortat self-constructionis undoubtedly
a noteworthy achievement-for, as Snodgrass states in the title
poem of AfterExperience (1968), "Lives are saved this way"-the
group has the same basic limitationas the Romantics: the inability
to project that self into a recognizable milieu of other independent
human agents. Consequently, the carefully structuredpoetic idenSteven K. Hoffman

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703

titytends to remain isolated, ever threatening to harden into the

sterilityevoked by Plath's "Spinster':
And roundher house she set
Such a barricadeofbarb and check
Againstmutinousweather
As no mereinsurgentman could hope to break
Withcurse,fist,threat
Or love, either.
This danger may in factaccount forthe tendency among the confessionals to renounce the mode, oftenat a cost in quality, either forthe
creation of an idealized "second world" of relatedness as in
Schwartz, a direct poetic communion with the transcendent Other
as in Berryman and Sexton, or a bond with immanent Otherness
itself-through the medium of death in Plath or nature in Roethke
and Ginsberg-at which point the concept of a separate, contingent
self,withoutwhich confessional poetrycould not exist,is put aside.
The exceptions to this trend are Snodgrass, whose "Heart's Needle" sequence turnson the complex interactionsof the developing
self with other people and a distinctlyindependent natural environment,and of course Robert Lowell, whose breadth of vision is
unmatched among the confessionals and, it may well be argued,
among contemporary poets in general. To be sure, the selfformationprocess begun in Life Studies continues throughouthis
career, but by Notebook it has been transferredinto the tumultuous
mainstream of American social and political life in the late 1960's;
the great public events-the war in Vietnam, the Pentagon peace
march, the Columbia uprising, and the 1968 Democratic
convention-and the smaller private dramas utterly converge.
Without minimizing the difficultiesof maintaining an identity in
such an atmosphere, Lowell's protagonistsnow exemplifya rejuvenated respect forand commitmentto the human other, made manifestin the humane kinship with the "green steel head," the titular
political enemy of "March II," and the strongromanticand familial

ties of For Lizzie and Harriet (1973) and The Dolphin. Once

realized only in its firmdefense against the intrusionof the other,

consistently perceived as a threat,the self in the most recent volumes depends forits veryexistence on the mutual satisfactioninherent in the human relationship, even to the point in "Angling" of
willing and ecstatic immersion in another's being: "I am swallowed
up alive

704

...

I am."

Perhaps

the aptest summary of Lowell's

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achievement is Gabriel Pearson's, one which illuminates both the

potential range and intrinsicvalues of a confessional poetic:
Lowell's poetic progress could be seen . . . as self-therapy.But

thetermsare toorestrictive.
One could putitratherthatLowell's
poeticcareerimitates-in an Aristotelian
sense-the progressof
self-therapy
and therebyproposesitselfas a case ofan ultimately
viable existence.It becomesexemplaryas a measureofthedepth
and intensityof the forcesthatbatterthe self fromwithinand
without,and describes the formsthatresistanceto these can
assume. Lowell as poet becomes the implicithero of his own
poetry,but,ofnecessity,verymucha debunkedand debunking
hero,diffident,
arrogant,self-destructive,
perhaps,mostof all,
despiteall, persistentand operative.15
Though more limited than Lowell, the other confessionals also
merit some of Pearson's praise, and on similar grounds. They too
thrustagainst the multitudinous dehumanizing forces in twentieth
century existence to emerge with that most precious prize, a multifaceted,independent self,an accomplsihment made equally available to those readers who have carefullyfollowed the stages of the
conflict. In that their abiding interest in the preservation and
growthof the self is accompanied by an equally strongcommitment
to the impersonal dictates of their craft,the confessionals combine
the best features of both the Romantic and modern traditions.That
even the major confessionals did not always produce uniformly
outstandingpoetry,thatthe confessional banner now seems to have
passed into less gifted hands, should not blind us to the considerable artisticachievements of Life Studies, Notebook, The Lost Son,
The Dream Songs, Ariel, Heart's Needle, and, to a lesser extent,In
Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Kaddish, and Live or Die. In a
period dominated by a new surrealistic poetic of cold detachment,
elliptical extremism, and ultimately silence, it is comfortingto
know that we can still turn to poems in which men continue to
speak to men in mutually understandable terms,poems thoroughly
engaged in recognizable human experience, poems, finally,which
hold firmlyto the updated Romantic ideal expressed by Wallace
Stevens in "The Noble Rider and the Sound ofWords," thatthough
unconstrained by any specific sense of social or political obligation,
the poet nonetheless "fulfills himself only as he sees his imagination become the light in the minds of others. His role, in short,is to
help people to live their lives."
Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University
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705

FOOTNOTES
1 The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (New York:
Oxford Univ. Press, 1967), p. 25. Rosenthal's initial use of the term appears in
"Poetryas Confession,"Nation, (19 September 1959), 154, 155. All futurereferences
to these and otherfootnotedsources will be cited informallyin the text.
tendencyis the usually astute British
2 The mostprominentvictimof the former
criticA. Alvarez, whose acceptance of the authenticityof the "confessional" attributes of the poetryled him to speculate at length on the potentiallypathological
especially in lightof the high incidence of
outcome of such intense self-absorption,
suicide among the poets involved. See "Beyond All This Fiddle," in Beyond All
This Fiddle: Essays 1955-1965 (New York: Random House, 1968), pp. 3-22 and The
Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York:Random House, 1972), pp. 255-74. The
very real danger to the critical perspective that this attitudeentails is illustrated
in Alvarez's posthumous tributeto Sylvia Plath for the BBC Third Programme.
Because he failed to adequately distinguishthe self-destructivemotifsin Plath's
poetryfromher real life suicide, he leftthe definiteimpressionofa directcausal link
between the two. Realizing the potentiallydire consequences of this stand on the
analytic function,he considerably softened it in a postscriptto the essay when
reprintedas "Sylvia Plath" in The Artof Sylvia Plath: A Symposium,ed. by Charles
Newman (Bloomington:Indiana Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 56-69. Anotherunfortunate
outgrowthof the overemphasis on the "confessional" as opposed to the "poetic"
nature of confessional verse is what I choose to call the therapeuticfallacy: the
presumptionthattheconfessionalmanagestoexorcisehis privatedemonsthroughhis
work.Rosenthalhimselftouched on the issue in his originalreview ofLife Studies;
RogerBowen perpetuateditin "Confessionand Equilibrium: RobertLowell's Poetic
Development," Criticism,11 (Winter1969), 78-93; and RobertPhillips applied it to
the entire group in The Confessional Poets (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ.
Press, 1973). IfthisstandardFreudian positiondoes indeed have validity,itcertainly
does not help to distinguishthe confessionalsfromany otherlyricpoets, who also
release potentiallyexplosive personal issues in the act of composition.In addition,
when applied specificallyto the confessionals,it has tended to seriouslyobscure the
degree to which conscious craftdeterminesthisliteraryendeavor. Anne Sexton,who
actuallybegan to writewhile in therapy,putthe matterin a morereasonable perspective: "You don'tsolve problemsin writing.They're stillthere.I've heardpsychiatrists
say,'See, you've forgivenyourfather.There itis in yourpoem.' But I haven'tforgiven
myfather.I just wrotethatI did." See "CraftInterviewwith Anne Sexton," in The
CraftofPoetry:InterviewsfromtheNEW YORK QUARTERLY, ed. WilliamPackard
(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), pp. 21, 22.
3 While a complete listofcontemporary
poets who have writtenexamples, isolated
or otherwise,of confessionalpoetrywould indeed be a long one, it seems properto
thinkof these eight as constitutingthe centerof the movementnot only in lightof
the sheer volume of outrightconfessional verse they produced but also the high
degree of personal interactionand artisticcross fertilization-higherthan usually
allowed-among them. Schwartz is the pivotal figurelargely because of his early
workin the mode and its considerable impacton Berrymanand Lowell, attestedto
in the long series of elegies to him in The Dream Songs and Lowell's Paris Review
interviewwith FrederickSeidel, reprintedin Robert Lowell: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. by Thomas Parkinson(Englewood Cliffs,N.J.: Prentice-Hall,1968),
pp. 12-36. Snodgrass,whose encounterwithAnne Sexton at a 1958 Antiochconferstudied under both Lowell
ence provided the impetus forthe latter'sinitial efforts,
and Berrymanat Iowa. Sexton and Plath attended Lowell's poetry workshop at
Boston Universityand, although they never met him, both later came under the
influenceofRoethke(See Sexton's"Classroom at BostonUniversity,"Harvard Advo-

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cate, 145 [November1961],13-15 and "The BarflyOughtto Sing," in The ArtofSylvia

Plath, pp. 174-82).While Ginsbergremainssomethingofan outsider,he did drawon
some ofthe movement'sprimaryRomanticand modernsources-primarilyWhitman,
Pound, and Williams-and served as a catalystforthe studied informality
ofLowell's
Life Studies (See Lowell's "On 'Skunk Hour,' "in The ContemporaryPoet as Artist
and Critic, ed. By AnthonyOstroff[Boston: Little, Brown, 1964], p. 108).
Again allowing forthe uniqueness ofeach poet's achievement,particularlyinsofar
as the various approaches to freeversus controlledformsare concerned,one is still
able to identifytwo and possibly three major confessional tendencies. The main
line, what could be called the realistic,anecdotal, or documentaryapproach,begins
withSchwartz,reaches its high pointin Life Studies-much ofwhich was completed
long beforeits 1959 publication-and continuesin Snodgrass'Heart's Needle (1960),
the familyportraitsin Sexton's All My PrettyOnes (1962), and several pieces (e.g.,
"Point Shirley") in Plath's The Colossus (1960) but also includes partsof Roethke's
Greenhouse sequence in The Lost Son (1948); Berryman'sLove & Fame (1970), a
volume heavily indebted to Lowell; and even Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and "Sunflower
Sutra." The second, predominantlysurrealisticwing had its genesis in Roethke's
"The Lost Son" and the related sequences in Praise to the End! (1951) and subsumes the madhouse pieces in Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and
Live or Die (1966), the hallucinatorydramas of Plath's Ariel (1965), and the experiments in sur-or "unrealism" in Lowell's Notebook (1970). While The Dream Songs
(1969) has numerousexamples ofboth tendencies, because ofits linguisticvariation
and overall expressionisticcoloration,it must be considered a confessional wing
unto itself,as the virtualabsence of successful developments fromit by otherswill
attest.
4 Alvarez introducedhis termin "Beyond All This Fiddle" and embellished it in
Under Pressure: The Writerin Society, Eastern Europe and the USA (Baltimore:
Penguin Books, 1965), pp. 181-89 and The Savage God, pp. 255-74. Spears used the
term"open" poetry,as well as the "poetryofinvolvement"in Dionysus and the City
(New York:OxfordUniv. Press, 1970), pp. 229-61. Perloff'sdiscussion of"documentary"verse is to be foundin The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (Ithaca: Cornell Univ.
Press, 1973), pp. 80-100; 164-85.
A parallel criticaltendency,and one which thisstudyhopes to extend,has been to
concentrateless on replacement terminologythan the technical aspects of confessional poetry.General works of this nature include Donald Davie's "Sincerityand
Poetry,"Michigan QuarterlyReview, 5 (January1966), 3-8; A. R. Jones' "Necessity
and Freedom: The Poetryof RobertLowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton," Critical Quarterly,7 (Spring 1965), 11-30; Ralph J. Mills'Creation's Very Self: The Personal Element in RecentAmerican Poetry(Fort Worth:Texas ChristianUniv. Press,
1969); and Alan Williamson's "'I AM that I AM': The Ethics and Aesthetics of
Self-Revelation,"American PoetryReview, 3 (March 1974), 37-39. Recent studies of
individual confessionalswith insightsrelevantto the entiregroupare JohnBayley's
"John Berryman:A Question of Imperial Sway," Salmagundi, No. 22-23 (SpringSummer 1973), 84-103; Philip Cooper's The Autobiographical Mythof Robert Lowell (Chapel Hill: Univ. of NorthCarolina Press, 1970); JohnCrick's Robert Lowell
(Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1974); JenijoyLaBelle's The Echoing Wood of Theodore Roethke (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1976); Perloffs The Poetic Art of
Robert Lowell; RosemarySullivan's Theordore Roethke: The Garden Master (Seattle: Univ. ofWashingtonPress, 1975); and Alan Williamson'sPitythe Monsters:The
Political Vision of Robert Lowell (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1974).
5 Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, ed. by Donald Dike and David Zucker
(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1970), pp. 10, 11.
6 More complete discussions of Abrams' nomenclatureare to be found in "Structureand Style in the GreaterRomanticLyric," in From Sensibilityto Romanticism:

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707

Essays Presentedto FrederickA. Pottle,ed. by FrederickHilles and Harold Bloom

(New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 527-61 and Natural Supernaturalism
(New York: Norton,1971); Langbaum's, in The Poetryof Experience, 2nd ed., rev.
(New York:Norton,1971). I am indebted to Perloffs The Poetic Artof RobertLowell
forsuggestingthe relevance to the confessionalmode of the Abramsarticleand the
Langbaum book.
7 The Poet in the Poem (Berkeley: Univ. of CaliforniaPress, 1960), p. 48.
8 "The Poet as Poet," in Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz,p. 73. In restricting
mydiscussion to these poets my intentionis to focus on what are generallyconsidered the major exemplars of the main line of literarymodernism.Obviously the
confessionalscould, and in many individual cases did draw on other examples of
modern experiential poetry-Thomas Hardy's dramatic vignettes, Ford Maddox
Ford's turnof the centuryimpressionism,AmyLowell's imagism,and the worksof
such nativeAmericanpoets as Lindsay, Masters,Robinson,and Frost.The latterare
particularlynoteworthyin a discussion ofthe confessionalsin thattheycharacteristically "sought not only to portraycharacterand local settingbut also to trace the
impactofsocial conventionsand institutionson individuallife,as well as the deeper
psychologicaltensionswithinand between individuals." See David Perkins'A Historyof Modern PoetryFrom the 1890s to the High Modernist Mode (Cambridge:
The Belknap Press, 1976), p. 232. Anotherpoet deserving of some mentionin this
regardis D. H. Lawrence, whose Look We Have Come Through!(1917) is arguably
the firstmodernconfessionalwork.Yet, like the othersmentionedhere, his impact
on the contemporarypoets seems limited-clearly evident only in Roethke and
perhaps Ginsberg. The poets singled out fordiscussion in the textexerteda much
morepervasive influenceon the confessionals,especially in theirformativestages,
and, indeed, laid much of the groundworkformidcenturypoetryin general.
9 Naturallythe confessionalsrecognized the deeply personal aspects of the Four
Quartets and the outrightconfessionalnature-albeit in a moretraditional,religious
sense of the term-of "Ash Wednesday." Insofar as Eliot's earliest verse is concerned, mostof themshared the experience of Snodgrass,who initiallyaccepted on
faithits fundamentalimpersonalityand only later realized its private import.See
Robert Boyers' "W. D. Snodgrass: An Interview," in Contemporary Poetry in
America, ed. by Robert Boyers (New York: Schocken, 1974), pp. 175 ff.Schwartz,
however, was an exception to this trendand, given his criticalrole in the developmentof the confessionalpoetic, a particularlyimportantone, forhe saw clearly the
autobiographicalrelevance of "The Waste Land" as well as the potentialdangersso oftenascribed to confessional poetry-of what he called Eliot's "journalistic"
method. His remarkson the matterin "T. S. Eliot's Voice and His Voices" (1954)
shed additional lighton his own workand thatofthe othermembersofthe group:
It mustbe admittedthatthe new method is a dangerous one, requiring
not only a great deal of passive receptivitybut also the operation of a
severe criticalsense to assure the genuineness and the purityof what is
received: the listening and the quotation can easily become selfindulgent; can become an intolerable looseness, emotionalism,or selfrevelationfortheirown sake or forthe purpose of sensationalism."
(Selected Essays of Delmore Schwartz, p. 140)
10Straw for the Fire: From the Notebooks of Theodore Roethke,1943-63, ed. by
David Wagoner(Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1974), p. 201.
11"Ezra Pound," in The Freedom of the Poet (New York:Farrar,Straus& Giroux,
1976), p. 269.
12 Barbara Knowles, "Anne Sexton: The Art of Poetry XV," Paris Review, 52
(Summer 1971), 182.
13 Alan Williamson,Pitythe Monsters:The Political Vision
ofRobertLowell, p. 4.

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The Makingof a ConfessionalPoetic

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14 The self of which I speak is neitherA. R. Jones' "naked ego" nor Rosenthal's
"literal self' but a purelyaesthetic entitywhich,while based on the poet's own, has
an existence solely in the poem. Its closest kinshipis withthe poetic voice itself;in
fact,the creationof a recognizable voice-also a cumulativeprocess that,especially
in the confessional sequences, carriesits own past along with it-is forthese poets
the technical counterpartof a simultaneous conceptual process of creatingand puttingintopracticea continuallyembellished fictiveobject,a composite poetic self.In
thatthe poet himselfremains sufficientlydistinctfromhis poetic counterpart,the
failuresor successes of the one need have no direct bearing on those of the other.
Thus it is thatthe confessionals oftenproject a successful poetic adaptation to circumstance even when such was not the case in theirown experience.
15 Gabriel Pearson, "Robert Lowell: The Middle Years," in ContemporaryPoetry
in America, ed. by Robert Boyers,p. 53.

Steven K. Hoffman

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