Confessional Poetry and Why Its, like Basically Twitter
By Lexie Rose
Confessional poetry sounds like something you would read out of your sister’s diary talking about how she and ‘Steve’ kissed for the first time Saturday night. However, that is not the case. In reality, confessional poetry is some dark s**t. Mostly because it explored topics that were ‘taboo’ back in the day, such as suicide and depression and explicit sex. Its like when someone writes something way too personal on twitter, and you hope their friends tell them to delete it. Its like a train wreck, you just can’t seem to look away, no matter how much you want to.
You may still be confused about what it is. So lets get into it. Confessional poetry is, “Private experiences with and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships were addressed in this type of poetry, often in an autobiographical manner”, (Poets.org ). My mind immediately takes me to Sylvia Plath. Oh Sylvia Sylvia Sylvia. Known for her eventual suicide and mental illness. Lets take a look at one of her most famous confessional poems to get a better grasp on what it is.
In “Daddy” by good ole’ Sylvia, its almost a window into her head. After reading it, you realize why she battled with mental illness. Her upbringing wasn’t a fairytale. Throughout the poem, she refers to her father as the “Nazi” with the “Aryan eye”, and the “Neat mustache”, while she is “the jew”, (Plath). This obviously refers to an oppressive type of relationship between her and her father. She also overtly hints that she doesn’t know how to feel about his death, “I thought of killing you”. This is pretty dark stuff. It gets worse. She then hits the readers with a line that seems way too personal that it makes you uncomfortable, “At twenty I tried to die/And get back, back, back to you. /I thought even the bones would do. /But they pulled me out of the sack,/And they stuck me together with glue” (Plath). This is almost the epitome of a good example of confessional poetry. Its something that is so personal to the poet that it makes you feel as though the poem wasn’t meant for you to read.
So, basically you see how this could have been a shock to a lot of people living in this time period (1940-1980). Confessional poetry took off in this era. Poetry during this time period was all about life and it was creative, but it wasn’t about taboo topics such as these. This is the distinct element that sets them apart. Confessional poetry opened the door to poems being a type of release for those feelings. As time goes on, poets realized the power behind creativity and breaking form.
Confessional poetry is supposed to be personal and make you feel something. Even if you don’t personally connect to Plath’s attempts at suicide or her relationship with her father, you recognize how painful it must’ve been due to her beautifully relayed emotion through this type of poetry.
Although poetry is considered to be ‘dying’, confessional poetry seems to be even more relevant today than it was back then. A certain book of poems called “Milk and Honey” by Rupi Kaur has become perhaps one of the most famous books of modern poetry. It’s an autobiographical, chronological account of a young woman falling in love and having her heart broken. It showcases her depression and abuse, which is extremely personal. It universally renowned for being relatable to not only young women, but men and women of every age due to the realness of the human emotion portrayed and the connections the readers feel to the speaker.
So basically, confessional poetry is just like twitter. Before twitter, peoples’ personal lives just weren’t discusses unless it was between close friends. Nowadays, I can log onto Twitter and see who’s broken up, who’s sleeping together, and if someone if feeling down in the dumps. Just as twitter changed the way we see the world, so did confessional poetry. It took taboo topics and make them normalized, which is good because in doing that, it also began the movement to normalizing discussing mental illness. Even today, mental illness is often delegitimized and not taken seriously. However, we are moving in the right steps to get a conversation going about how to prevent and treat it.
Works Cited
” A Brief Guide to Confessional Poetry .” Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, 21 Feb. 2014. Web. 28 Jan. 2017.
Plath, Sylvia, Kristen Osborne, “Sylvia Plath: Poems Confessional Poetry.” GradeSaver. N.p., 4 Jan. 2012. Web. 01 Feb. 2017.
Plath , Sylvia. “Daddy by Sylvia Plath | Poetry Foundation.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017.
Snograss, W. D. “The Original Confessional Poet Tells All.” Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 01 Feb. 2017.