Poetry and/or Truth: An Essay on the Confessional Imagination

Abstract

The German critic Friedrich Schlegel signalled towards the close of the eighteenth century the subjective character of much Romantic literature with the observation that 'the modern poet must create all things from within himself ... each poet separately and each work from its very beginning, like a creation out of nothing.' Yet the Romantic work is not necessarily a production ,ex nihilo; unlike 'ancient poetry' it is 'based entirely on a historical foundation,' for it has 'a true story at its source, even if variously reshaped.' Much Romantic and post-Romantic literature aims for a definition of the self in historical terms, as a process of becoming. This process has been enacted in literary form since the Romantics through autobiography as well as fiction, with confessional fiction forming a prominent and problematic middle term. Modern autobiography first found its self-referential voice in the self-serving Confessions of Rousseau (1782–9), and the self-advertising adventures of the letter 'I' have held a centre-stage position in much writing since 1800. Indeed, what Schlegel observed about the relationship between writers of fiction and their works seems to hold substantially true nearly two hundred years later: 'What is best in the best novels is nothing but a more or less veiled confession of the author.'