What is Confessional Poetry?

A Lesson by Judy

It is hard for me to describe it in a way that I would like you to all understand - so I am going to 'google' something and let you read it. However, for starters, the confessional form of poetry is a set of poets and their themes, if you will. Much like there were the Beat Poets, or the Romantic Poets or the Modernist Poets, etc,

I took this information from the Poetry Foundation website - www.poetryfoundation.org. It is by far one of the more spectacular sites. As we progress, I will introduce you to other resources for poetry.

Vividly self-revelatory verse associated with a number of American poets writing in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, andJohn Berryman. The term was first used by M.L. Rosenthal in a 1959 review of Life Studies, the collection in which Robert Lowell revealed his struggles with mental illness and a troubled marriage. Read an interview with Snodgrass in which he addresses his work and the work of others associated with confessionalism.