Confessional Poetry Research Articles

Exploring Therapeutic Dynamics in Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetry: Self-expression, Healing, and Narrative Dialogue

Exploring Therapeutic Dynamics in Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetry: Self-expression, Healing, and Narrative Dialogue

“Cured, I Am Frizzled, Stale, and Small”: Jungian Individuation Realized in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies

Robert Lowell’s Life Studies won the National Book Award for Poetry in 1960 and is credited with initiating the confessional poetry movement, which included followers and students of Lowell such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. In Life Studies, Lowell channeled his 1950s experiences with bipolar disorder and mental health hospitalizations into poems such as “Man and Wife”, “Waking in the Blue”, and “Home After Three Months Away”. Lowell’s hard-won Life Studies triumph, though most recently analyzed through socioeconomic and “divine madness” lenses, can also be understood through Carl Jung’s individuation concept which posits that self-realization can be attained through the reconciliation of one’s own conscious and unconscious mental processes. This article argues that Lowell’s Life Studies poems, when examined through Jungian individuation, enabled Lowell to achieve self-realization, and paved the way for mentally ill individuals to learn how to achieve psychological wholeness through art.

The Art of Self-Disclosure: An Exploration of Confessional Poetry in Contemporary Literature

The Art of Self-Disclosure: An Exploration of Confessional Poetry in Contemporary Literature

Elsewhere: Laura Marcus and autobiography

ABSTRACT This essay pays tribute to Laura Marcus’s work on autobiography, and her interest in emergent aesthetic discourses, by discussing two fictionalised memoirs, John Berger’s Here is Where We Meet, and Lisa Robertson’s The Baudelaire Fractal. One theme is the lure of what Yves Bonnefoy calls ‘cet ailleurs insituable’ or the ‘elsewhere’. In the course of the discussion of autobiographical ruses I also briefly discuss confessional poetry, and Virginia Woolf, with Laura Marcus as interlocutor.

The Bell Jar: Sylvia Plath's first-person narrative of core elements for diagnosing and treating clinical depression

SUMMARY The Bell Jar (1963) is a semi-autobiographical novel written by the confessional poet, novelist and short-story writer Sylvia Plath (1932–1963). It has been often cited as a recommended reading within the medical humanities, because of its powerful description of depression and the understanding-by-experience of the related psychiatric treatments. This brief article, primarily directed at the clinically oriented reader, presents a selection of excerpts from The Bell Jar to illustrate the main diagnostic features of clinical depression and the vital role of therapeutic relationship quality in hindering or facilitating treatment outcomes and recovery.

Writing as Resilience: Holocaust Trauma in Select Novels of Elie Wiesel

“Most Consciences are satisfied quickly enough, and need only a few words in order to reach a definitive opinion of the unknowable” (111, Edkins, Trauma and the Memory of Politics). Most trauma writings are considered as spring boards for furthering academic mileage or presenting a paper to inflate the curriculum vitae or credentials that fetch some perks. As a student of literature I always had a skeptical take on the confessional poetry of Kamala Dass which was otherwise categorized as erotic, revealing kind of writing and mostly not regarded as something important. But after reading novels on Armenian genocide, holocaust and world war , it became evident that people write about their trauma: collective, personal or social in order to inform, support and to convey a stronger message that writing is a way of displaying their solidarity and courage. To put in in William Faulkner’s terms, these writers prefer writing as resilience to reiterate that the past is not dead, infact it is not even past. Only a few care to read between the lines and it is important to learn why people write on trauma: personal, collective or generational which technically lie outside the boundaries of experience, unfathomable but welling up waves of perennial pain and horror that need to be vented but no specific ways or means can ever drain it out. By the time one finishes to understand the definition of trauma painted by the linguistic or symbolic yardsticks, it feels like mind draining activity. This paper tries to unravel the rationale of writing trauma and the reverberations of trauma through the select works of Elie Wiesel.

Poetry Lies: Poststructuralism and Robert Lowell’s Idea of Literary Representation

ABSTRACT While Lowell’s private life is put on the spotlight and the signification of his poetry is attached to the trauma and drama of his life, it remains pressing to ask what actually distinguishes Lowell’s poetry. Lowell serves as a touchstone case for criticism on confessional poetry, and poetry in general, because Lowell’s poems negate the definition of writing as literary representation and simple celebration of personal aura, which greatly differs from his real life or the biographical depiction of his life. The distinction between Lowell and the lyric I sometimes might appear blurred but is still existing. With the poems discussed here, there is a lack of self-indulgence and egocentrism that Lowell’s biography and his handling of Hardwick’s letters imply. This article will address this contradiction between Lowell and the lyric I (or Lowell as a poet), which is especially conspicuous when Lowell defies the possibility of literary representation.

SORROW AND REMORSE IN ANNE SEXTON’S POETRY

Readers and critics alike responded to Anne Sexton's confessional poetry in conflict during the 1950s and 60s. Because of the authentic way in which her poems delve into emotions, some critics had a positive opinion of her poetry. However, some critics contended that Sexton's writing was tainted by her emotions rather than being poetry in the traditional sense. The nature of emotion in poetry and its importance are assessed by the critics in each scenario. Emotions, in fact, secure the sense and meaning of the poetry in a sense-making manner. This essay argues that Sexton's use of emotion to convey her feelings about particular events is evident in her poetry. Through an analysis of her poetry, one can discern the ways in which her individual emotions shaped the overall structure of the poem as well as the shaping spirit and cognitive dimension of emotion. This essay examines the feelings of regret and grief found in Anne Sexton's poetry and shows how these feelings explain the things that happened in her life and give her poems meaning and logic. It makes the case that the emotion found in Sexton's poetry is based on assessments and judgments the woman has made about things that have happened in her life. Sexton considered these events and her feelings about them with awareness and intelligence.<p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/soc/0661/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Tragic Poetry and the Cultural Foundation of Power: A Re-examination of Franco Moretti’s Theory of Tragic

Franco Moretti posited in his 1983 book, Signs Taken for Wonders, that we live in a post-tragic and anti-tragic age in which tragic has been replaced by compromise both in fiction and in the modern lyric. The present article tries to re-examine Moretti’s conjecture in a historic period which has given up compromise and revived the tragic. In Moretti’s terms, tragic’s condition of existence involves “a civilization irreparably divided between hostile entries and values”. Whenever history allows this radical division between two irreconcilable systems of values, tragic finds a literary form of expression. In this article, tragic’s main contemporary elective form in Ukraine is poetry, while fiction seems somewhat slower in keeping pace with the rapid tragic of history. Moreover, the diary as a confessional genre closer to poetry is also a medium more suitable for the contemporary tragic than fiction. Read by tens of thousands, maybe even more, Ukrainian poetry and diaries are the direct proof of a return to a tragic era, confirming Moretti’s 1983 diagnosis: tragic works within and against the absolutist ideologies. Tragedy may indeed be “an unrepeatable ‘exception’ in the history of literary forms”; but the substance of tragic finds its contemporary expressions in this age of anti-compromise in confessional poetry and, to a lesser extent, in other confessive genres (diaries and memoirs). Tragic poetry is a response to the reappearance of the cultural foundation of absolutist power; its confessional nature is an attempt to rehumanize a history unleashed against the human.

Confessional Poetry Revealing Contemporary Realities Through Self Agonies

Poetry is the communication of experiences in the form of art. The experiences which defined as poetry of the personal is called confessional poetry. Confessional poetry is the frank expression of personality. This poetry is of self-revealing in nature as it seeks to reveal the poets' state of mind and their feelings. Sylvia Plath, Kamala Das, Anne Sexton and Andrienne Rich are best examples of confessional poets. They universalized the sufferings and surmounting pain of womanhood through the lens of their own experiences in their lives. Their works demonstrate the tragedy of life of being a woman in a patriarchal based structure of society. In subject matter, confessional poets concentrate on the history of their own lives.

Unbecoming Archives: Anne Sexton's "Perverse" Imagination

Abstract: It is impossible to read much about American poet Anne Sexton before encountering references to her "perverse" imagination. Critics routinely argue that she paints a perverse vision of childhood sexuality, female identity, and adult sexuality in her work, and they often object to her frank discussions of the body, its pleasures, and its dangerous powers. Her depictions of mental illness, initiated in To Bedlam and Part Way Back , also earned the derision of many critics who urged her "not to enquire further." Helen Vendler (1988) argued that "a poem was never better for having a uterus in it," and James Dickey objected to being exposed to so much "naked suffering"; that quote was in Anne's wallet when she killed herself in her garage in 1974. In her interviews and her poetry, Sexton answered these critics as a confessional poet and a cultural critic. But even after her death, accusations of her perversion abound. First, her biographer, Diane Middlebrook, exposed her sexual abuse of her daughter Linda. And then Sexton's sister Blanche referred to the poet's "perverse imagination" in a 1991 letter to the Boston Globe , where she and her daughters objected to how Middlebrook's biography represented Sexton's family as riddled with alcoholism, child neglect and/or abuse, and suicide.

The Western Reception of Forugh Farrokhzad: New Orientalism and Confessional Poetry

The following study proposes to deconstruct the mythologising of Forugh Farrokhzad (1934/5-1967), a poet known mostly as Iran’s Sylvia Plath. This kind of analogy is based on interpretative and cultural preconceptions that connect women’s poetry with personal experience and amount the poetic voice to the empirical reality. Beyond that biographical obsession, reified through the export of confessionalism, comparing the two writers also implies appropriation of Forugh Farrokhzad to a Western cultural and literary field. By analysing a few poems, taking a close look at her interviews, and examining the historical context, I shall try to demonstrate that Farrokhzad is actually split between two worlds. Therefore, to associate her with Sylvia Plath can be read as an example of what Fatemeh Keshavarz, a researcher on Persian literature, calls the New Orientalist narrative.

Exploring the Intersection of Feminist and Psychoanalytic Theory in the Confessional Poetry of Anita Nair and Kamala Das

The genre of confessional poetry is defined by the poet's personal and frequently extremely emotional experiences. It first appeared in the middle of the 20th century and is characterised by a personal tone and the first-person point of view. This paper shall examine the confessional elements in the poetry of two prominent Indian poets, Anita Nair and Kamala Das, through a feminist and psychoanalytic perspective. In order to examine themes of love, relationships, and identity in their poetry, Nair and Das use personal experiences, emotions, and thoughts in their poems. The paper will examine the intricate power relationships between men and women underlying Nair and Das' poetry. The paper will emphasise the complex intersection of gender, power, and personal experience that underlies Anita Nair's and Kamala Das's poetry through an analysis of the confessional elements in their works.

Intersemiotic Modernism: Matija Ferlin’s Sad Sam Lucky between Poetry and Its Embodiment

Sad Sam Lucky is a solo performance by the choreographer and performer Matija Ferlin, conceived as part of his ongoing non-dance-like and non-theatrelike conceptual project Sad Sam, which started in January 2004 in Amsterdam, where the first part of this pseudo-durational piece was premiered. Ferlin’s performance Sad Sam Lucky is somewhat specific in the author’s oeuvre, mainly because it assays to become a physical response to the work of the Slovenian avant-garde poet Srečko Kosovel (1904—1926), translating it and transposing it at the same time, in-between languages and dialects (Slovenian, Croatian, Istrian, and/or English), and in-between performative regimes (embodied response and a pseudo-recital). Kosovel’s confessional poetry, i.e. profound, contemporary, tense in its stylistic imagery, and, at the same time, almost revolutionary in its ideas, is therefore being performed as a live matter of language, driven by Ferlin’s main idea — not to do theatre, not to do dance, not to translate, but to trans-body Kosovel’s verses, and his melancholic prophecy, thus creating a form of a highly physical, turbulent and emotional homage to this very unique avant-garde author.

Making, Living and Remaking the Myth: Plath and Her Mythical World of Poetry

Sylvia Plath is a very well-known figure in American and English literature. She is the back of modern literature and the face of postmodern literature, as her works reflect the characteristics of both ages. She is one of the four main members of the Confessional School of Poetry, and most of her works depict the theme of self-obsession. Her poetry is the poetry of “I”, but what makes her poetry different from others is her use of myth in her craft. As she was very fond of dying and death, she has used various myths related to death or can, say, in an altered way. She has done it so artfully that with her subtle usage of myth in her poetry, she has become a myth. The central theme of her poetry, as well as her myth, is, as it is obvious, death and rebirth. As a confessional poet, she has never been interested in the life and death of other people but in her own. Each anthology of hers, chiefly Colossus, and Ariel, discusses the very theme. Many of her poems depict her desperate desire to die. Lady Lazarus, Ariel, Fever 103, and The Manor Garden are chief among them. These poems also depict this theme of morbidity through the subtle use of mythology. In this paper, the researcher is willing to discuss the Sylvian myth in the poem, Lady Lazarus, along with the original myth.

Be Poetics of Plenitude and the Poet’s Biography: Self-Creation in Some Later Poems by John Ashbery

Thee article deals with the status of biographical references in John Ashbery’s later poetry. It is an attempt to work out an approach that, while keeping the biographical in view, is an alternative to the way in which the biographical has functioned in recent Ashbery scholarship. In discussing Ashbery’s strategy, I use the neo-pragmatist idea of aesthetic self-creation, especially a version of it developed by Alexander Nehamas in his writings on aesthetic objects. The term I am developing to discuss the variety of self-creation in Ashbery is “the emerging self,” and I see it as a component of a poetics which I am calling the pragmatist ironist poetics of plenitude. The emerging self of the poetics of plenitude, rising over the expanse of a lifetime of poetry writing, is a type of poetic authorial subjectivity whose relation to the empirical facts of the author’s biography reverses the relation between poetry and biography found in confessional poetry. The poetics of plenitude shows the biographical fact to be dependent on the poetic element on which it relies for its authenticity. Within the poetics of plenitude, it is the poetic that is the real and authentic.

The Representation of the Oriental Woman in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry: Liberating the Veiled Body in “Purdah” and “Ariel”

The present article discusses the representation of Oriental female figures in selected poems of Confessional poet Sylvia Plath, revealing the function of the women’s representations and their contribution to the poet's battle against patriarchy. The Orientalist aspect of Plath’s works is complex and comprises different layers of meanings. The analysis focuses on the characters of Ariel and the Muslim bride in “Purdah” regarding the notion of modesty through the physical and symbolic object of the veil. Thus, the study raises the question of whether the poet offered Eastern women the same voice of liberation as Westerners or whether her judgment was influenced by Oriental discourse that is prone to stereotypes and a lack of knowledge about other cultures and religions. The study relies on Edward Said’s Orientalist discourse, alongside Leila Abu Lughoud’s clarification on the position of Oriental women in the Western eye. The analysis also sheds light on concepts such as the “Wild Woman Archetype” to focus on the paradoxes of empowerment and subjugation embodied in the Oriental figures referenced in Plath’s poems. The study illustrates, through selected poems, the attitude of Sylvia Plath towards Oriental women and her endeavor to speak out on behalf of women's rights universally, at the risk of dismissing the peculiarities of Oriental culture and religion.

LES SIGNIFICATIONS DU NOM ȘOAPTĂ DANS LA POÉSIE DE TRAIAN DORZ

This paper aims to discuss some meanings of the noun șoaptă/ ‘whisper’ (derived by backformation), as reflected in the confessional poetry of Traian Dorz - a contemporary Romanian author whose work is undoubtedly the fruit of the spiritual experiences that have decisively marked his existential route. In fact, the relationship of the human being with God (in the earthly sphere, but also from the perspective of eternity) remains a constant theme of this work dedicated to the astonishing feeling of His unmistakable love, in connection with which everything is situated, more than once, within the coordinates of the unspeakable: it is a special kind of “verbalization,” which offers the opportunity to live in a true spiritual discipline, substituting (and suppressing) any other form of confession through ordinary words. In addition to simply illustrating such expressive valences that contribute to the achievement of the textual construction, the meanings of the above-mentioned noun highlight the deep feelings of the authorial ego, always ascending on the path of mystical knowledge, and are placed on a positive semantic direction, as a special way of inner “speech”, in the absence of which communication would be inconceivable.

The story of Freud's patient Anna von Lieben - as told by Anna von Lieben.

Anna von Lieben (Cäcilie M.) was treated for some 5 years by Sigmund Freud who discussed her case in Studies on Hysteria. This article presents an alternative view of the case based on the discovery of new primary material, principally, a handwritten corpus of confessional poetry by Anna herself. The poems were studied using a qualitative research methodology, interpretative phenomenological analysis (IPA), the findings of which were then further explored through the lens of her husband's unpublished diary entries. On this basis, it is suggested that Anna's ill-health appears to have been due mainly to chronic gynaecological disease, morphinism, troubles of iatrogenic origin and possibly phenomena similar to what are now termed psychogenic non-epileptic seizures (PNESs). Overall, the findings contradict Freud's account of satisfactory therapeutic progress culminating in a cure.

Mythology in Modern Literature: An Exploration of Myths and Legends in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry

Mythology has become an intrinsic part of literature for the symbolic, structural and functional values it imparts to a text. Although the use of myths and legends in literature has been transformed contextually over the different literary periods, modern writers extensively reappropriated and used them to portray the complexity of the theme and narrative structure of a text. They illustrated the contemporary fragmented reality and individual experience through myths. By incorporating myths in a text, modern writers sometimes created fictionalized and artificial myths of their own. American poet Sylvia Plath made personalized use of myths and legends in her poetry. The paper shows how she, as a confessional poet, amalgamates her personal anxiety and distress with characters and symbols from diverse mythological sources such as the story of Medusa, Medea, Persephone, Electra etc. Apart from classical myths, she incorporated European folktales, Norse and Arthurian myths. Her extensive use of myths portrays the condition of women and the role of patriarchy from a feminist perspective. It also illustrates her attitude toward her father and mother, her distress, agony and suicidal attempts and sometimes expresses her views on life and the contemporary world. Like many modern poets, she turned away from the traditional and orthodox poetic practice and rechanneled her individual crises into poetry which is full of mythological symbols and images.