Writing Problems: Confession

What is confession? What is the difference between confession and making the self the subject? Why does it matter?

Confessional poetry began in the post World War II period as a challenge to the conservatism of the fifties, as a challenge to T.S. Eliot’s religious frame to literary criticism, and as a challenge to the New Criticism which emphasized authorial detachment, a de-emphasis on reading biography, and thinking of poems as artifacts that could be assessed objectively.

As a school of poetry, Confessional really only refers to a handful of primaries: Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, and John Berryman; Lowell’s 1959 book Life Studies influenced the second tier of confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W.D. Snodgrass. The subjects of the Confessional poets included divorce, mental breakdowns, anxieties of all kinds, suicide, patricide, physical and psychological trauma, and the terrors of childhood.