Confessional poetry as a genre was first characterized by the critic M. L. Rosenthal in 1959. It has become a potent force, and its practitioners the poetic voices of our time. The poetry is highly subjective, written with frankness and lack of re­straint, and focuses on the ugliness of life. Its leading practitioners, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman, have all been recipients of the highest awards in literature, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry. Robert Phillips, a critic and also a poet, here directs our attention to the genre in the first book on the subject. In addition to the poets noted above, he discusses the work of Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg. Especially valuable are the author's defi­nition and historical review of the genre and his use of interviews and personal comments. An appraisal of the genre, his book is also a guide to new avenues open to poets writing today.

"The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed--with, around, and against the text of their lives." --

Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century—and Life Studies and For the Union Dead stand as among his most important volumes. In Life Studies, which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of For the Union Dead concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.

Explores how poems have been used as autobiographies throughout time.

<I>Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice returns to the poet's early works, such as <I>Land of Unlikeness and <I>Lord Weary's Castle, in search of a relationship between Lowell's early poetry and his turn to a confessional style of writing in the 1950s. Lowell's early poetry is often overshadowed by the emergence of his confessional poetry (that develops in <I>Life Studies; however, instead of Lowell's early poetry being eclipsed by <I>Life Studies, a remembrance of his early poetry is necessary as a way of understanding Lowell's evolution as a poet. The early poetry provides readers and scholars of Lowell with a Puritan paradigm and the ethos of an American narrative that Lowell never fully abandons but only perpetually deconstructs.

A thoughtful exploration of male poets' contributions to the literature of motherhood In the late 1950s the notion of a "mother poem" emerged during a confessional literary movement that freed poets to use personal, psychosexual material about intimate topics such as parents, childhood, failed marriages, children, infidelity, and mental illness. In Male Poets and the Agon of the Mother, Hannah Baker Saltmarsh argues that male poets have contributed to what we think of as the literature of motherhood—that confessional and postconfessional modes have been formative in the way male poets have grappled with the stories of their mothers and how those stories reflect on the writers and their artistic identities. Through careful readings of formative elegies and homages written by male poets of this time, Saltmarsh explores how they engaged with femininity and feminine voices in the 1950s and 60s and sheds light on the inheritance of confessional motifs of gender and language as demonstrated by postconfessional writers responding to the rich subject matter of motherhood within the contexts of history, myth, and literature. A foreword is provided by Jo Gill, professor of twentieth-century and American literature in the Department of English and associate dean for education at the University of Exeter.

This book revolves around the confessional poetry genre of English literature and it presents an insightful analysis of poems by Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das. The confessional elements elaborated upon by these authors mirror their respective cultural identities and personal turmoil in their lives. The discerning reader will appreciate their contributions in reference to their varied background and identities, which significantly shaped their thoughts and personalities to give a thrust to the ideas of feminism and confessionalism.