4 Poets Who Shaped Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry was a significant development in twentieth-century American poetry, characterised by poets who explored deeply personal experiences, emotions, and struggles in their work. Poet and Poetry School tutor Nisha Bhakoo who will be teaching her Online course, The Confessional Studio, with us this Autumn, discusses the writers at the forefront of this literary wave.

Image credit: @arina-krasnikova

Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. The term confessional poetry was coined by M. L. Rosenthal, when writing about Robert Lowell’s poetry collection Life Studies (1959).

His poem ‘Child’s Song‘ is about grasping – grasping for light, for innocence, for childhood, for physical and mental wellness, for love, for touch, for belonging, and for a paradise that is out of reach. I admire how much is revealed about the speaker’s state of mind through so few lines. I love how the desperation and agitation of the speaker is shown in the last stanza through the use of exclamation marks.

Read the full poem here: Child’s Song

Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath is one of the most well-known and widely studied poets of all time

The complexities of motherhood are explored strikingly in her poignant, short poem ‘Child‘. The last line “Ceiling without a star” makes me shudder with its hopelessness. The lines are deceivingly simple but they manages to express tender love as well as extreme feelings of distress and disappointment.

Read the full poem here: Child

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton is best known for poems exploring mental health, feminism and sexuality.

The strange imagery used throughout her poem ‘The Room of My Life‘ takes my breathe away, especially the lines “although birds explode” “and “the sea bangs in my throat.” Although I have always been fond of this poem, I feel particularly attached to it at the moment as I have recently moved into a new flat and have spent what seems like forever staring at the walls and the few objects in each room, waiting for different pieces of furniture to be delivered. The mood of this poem is often described as depressing and desperate, but I find this poem to be hopeful and dreamy, especially with lines such as “I feed the world in here too,” and “…nothing is what it seems to be.”

Read the full poem here: The Room of My Life

John Berryman

John Berryman is best known for The Dream Songs (1969), which is a personal sequence of 365 poems. His work influenced Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton.

His sonnet ‘Keep your eyes open when you kiss‘ captures the intensity, the messiness and the the jitters of lust and infatuation. I especially enjoy the unusual syntax as well as juxtoposition of the hidden and the open in the poem. I admire the frankness in his expressions of lust despite the slightly vulgar taste in the mouth that I’m left with after reading this poem.

Read the full poem here: Keep your eyes open when you kiss

Nisha Bhakoo is running her Online course The Confessional Studio with us this Autumn, starting on Monday 21 September. Find out more and secure your place here.

Nisha Bhakoo is a poet and academic who is interested in confessional poetry. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Dundee. She has two published poetry pamphlets and three published poetry collections. She also edited the Contemporary Gothic Verse Anthology published by The Emma Press. She taught literature and creative writing modules at the University of Dundee, University of Potsdam, and Humboldt University, Berlin. She has recently been awarded funding for her work by Creative Scotland and Society of Authors.