Confessional Poetry Research Articles

The adaptation and the different modifications of borrowed Arabic Plurals in Modern Turkish Kökende Çoğul Olarak Kullanılan Arapça Kelimelerin Türkçe’ye Geçmesi ve Türkiye Türkçesinde Kullanım Şekilleri

In the tenth century, Turks began to convert into Islam and adopted for official and literary use the Arabic language to study the teachings of the new religion they believed in. The use of many of the loanwords have become absolute in the Ottoman period, but even in Modern Turkish a large number of loanwords from Arabic can be often recognized because they are not subject to the strict rules of Turkish. Yet, some of these words lost its original meaning and acquired new different Turkish meaning. Moreover, some of the Arabic nouns of singular form in Turkish, modified the plural Turkish form. The present study entitled “the adaptation and the different modifications of borrowed Arabic Plurals in Modern Turkish” sheds light on the most important dictionaries of Turkish language that shows the different use as well as the adaptation of the borrowed Arabic plurals in Turkish. Özet X yüzyılda Türklerin İslamiyet’e tam bir şekilde girdikleri zamandan itibaren, onların girdikleri yeni dinin kuralını öğrenmeye başlamışlardır. Türklerin kendi inandıkları dinin kitabı, esası ve kuralları öğrenmek için Arap dilinin öğrenme çabaları o zamanlardan başlamıştır. O sırada Türkçenin kurallarına uymayan bir takım Arapça kökenli sözcükler Türkçeye geçip kullanılmaya başlanmıştır. Söz konusu kelimelerin en çok kullanıldığı dönem, Osmanlı devletinin bulunduğu dönem olup Türklerin Arap coğrafyasında bulunması böyle bir durum oluşturmaya büyük bir katkısı olmuştur. Yalnız Arapçadan Türkçeye geçmiş olan o kelimelerin bir kısmını anlamını kaybedip farklı bir anlamla veya farklı bir şekilde kullanılmaya başlanmıştır. Tekil anlamı veren Arapçadaki çoğul şeklini de kullanılan sözcükler de bulunmaktadır. Kökende çoğul olup Türkçede tekil olarak kullanılan bir takım sözcükler de bulunmaktadır. (Kökende Çoğul Olarak Kullanılan Arapça Kelimelerin Türkçe’ye Geçmesi ve Türkiye Türkçesinde Kullanım Şekilleri) adlı çalışmamızda Arapça kökenli çoğul sözcüklerin Türkçeye geçmesi açısından ve o sözcüklerin Türkiye Türkçesinde ne şekilde kullanıldığına dair tek tek Türkiye Türkçesinin sözlükleri tarayarak incelenecektir.

Audre Lorde's Who Said It Was Simple Characterized as a Confessional Mode

The research explores the confessional aspect in Audre Lorde's poem" Who Said It Was Simple ". Lorde depicts her personality under the stress of race, sex and sexuality. She discloses her own bitter experience concerning racism, sexism and sexuality in her poem to revive the retrospective truth of the Afro-Americans' life in the USA. This publicly manifestation of her personality and tribulation throughthe language ofpoetry has been regarded as the hallmark of confessional poetry.

HISTORY OF CONFESSIONAL POETRY IN INDIAN WOMEN WRITINGS A SHORT OVERVIEW

‘Confessional’ is an adjective first applied to the poems of the American poets Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman and Theodore Roethke to refer to the autobiographical nature of their work. The confessional poet considers the world, an extension of herself. All confessional poetry springs from the need to confess; confessional poets bare their soul and body and hide nothing between their self and their direct expression of that self. They put no restrictions on subject matter, no matter how personal. Usually anti-elegant and anti- establishment, confessional poems are almost like war-cries triumphing over pain and defeat. The best confessional poems are more than confessions: they are revelations, about their creator’s personal vexations, dilemmas and predicaments, and above all about the human condition. This review work tries to prove that confessional poetry was always present in Writings by women in India. This work is a literature review of known writings by women in India.

Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular AgeThe Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV

Thick and Dazzling Darkness: Religious Poetry in a Secular AgeThe Art of Confession: The Performance of Self from Robert Lowell to Reality TV

The Portrayal of Death in Sylvia Plath's Selected Poems

One of the most outstanding poets, novelists and short story writers in American literature is Sylvia Plath (1932-1963). A confessional poet whose texts are genuine in style and subject matter. Death is a dominant theme in the poetry of Sylvia Plath. She had dealt with this topic from various perspectives. Her father''s death left her dejected. Besides, her husband''s betrayal made her more forlorn and desperate. All of these events in her life caused her mental state disorder and this is clear in the poems I chose to analyze, “Daddy”, “Lady Lazarus”, and “Edge”. This paper examines Plath''s depiction of death in her poetry and the illustration of death related to her biography. It also aims at presenting the existence of death in her life and the absence of the fear of death in her poetry as well; which is her observation of death. Moreover, it will examine how Sylvia Plath’s mental state did affect her works and how it is important for the reader to know the background of Sylvia Plath to understand her works. Hence, the paper will start with introducing her style of writing. Then, the paper analyzes the selected poems accordingly. For this purpose, the paper will give a deep dive into the selected poems of the poet’s posthumously poem collection book “Ariel”, and conclude the overall picture of each poem for better understanding the reasons behind the poet’s behaviors. Finally, the paper concludes the findings of the study.

Self-reflection theme-line in conceptual EGO space of American female “confessional poetry”

Self-reflection theme-line in conceptual EGO space of American female “confessional poetry”

Utilising Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping (PDCM) to analyse how comparable liberal arts institutions evaluate poetry

ABSTRACT In We Need To Talk: A New Method for Evaluating Poetry (2018), Michael Theune and Bob Broad present a study that uses a version of their ‘Poetry Dynamic Criteria Mapping’ (PDCM) methodology to empirically and inductively investigate the implicit criteria in the selection of poems in creative arts journals. I employ a version of PDCM in my study. I coded and analysed 752 poems from the past three years’ issues of nine creative arts journals from liberal arts institutions in the same academic conference. Two important patterns emerged: (1) the vast majority of the poems are outgrowths of confessional poetry: free verse, serious, introspective, and focused on emotion; and (2) few poems seem aligned with other values, including those espoused by avant-garde, slam, and socially and politically engaged poetry.

Analysis of Love, Death, Rebirth and Patriarchy in Two Contemporary Poetess Forough Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath’s Selected Poems

ForoughFarrokhzad and Sylvia Plath’s poems are closely linked to their personal life and their marriage. Their poems are confessional in style. Farrokhzad criticizes Iranian male dominant society in which women are marginalized and haven’t any voice in the society, so seeking their voice and identity in modern literature, especially in modern Persian poetry. Sylvia Plath attempts to resist patriarchy in her society through her poems too. Two poets highlighting and expressing the lack of interest in life and the sole desire to die in most of their poems. Not only poetic imagery and themes like death, frustration and failure are common points that convey pessimistic views in their poems, but also few of their poems convey optimistic elements of life and hope so this paper is going to explain them too. Farrokhzad and Plath, two contemporary female poets, attempted to gain a voice for women in their country. They are considered as the successful feminist voices in their countries and astonishingly share the same themes and issues in their poetry. The present paper aims to highlight characteristics of confessional poetry and elaborate on concepts of love, death, rebirth and patriarchy in ForoughFarrokhzad and Sylvia Plath’s poems.

The Atlantic Ocean Breaking on Our Heads: Claudia Rankine, Robert Lowell, and the Whiteness of the Lyric Subject

InCitizen: An American Lyric,Claudia Rankine discovers new forms of lyric subjectivity by rerouting the expressive lyric's investment in the singular self, recognized in well-established lines of American genealogy, into a sustained and historicizing attention to dispersed networks of black kinship. She does so in a revisionary allusion to Robert Lowell'sLife Studiesand thereby lays bare the fact that his landmark book, which she treats as a paradigm of the expressive lyric tradition, relies on the (usually unspoken) whiteness of its lyric subject for the force of its autobiographical disclosures. Rankine'sCitizenthus not only helps us see confessional poetry—and the expressive lyric tradition for which it serves as apotheosis—in a radically new way but also develops an introspective lyric mode that remains alert, dispersed, and open to the political, social, and racialized formations that govern the lived experience of contemporary American life.

Themes in Kamala Das Poetry

Kamala Das was born on 31st March’ 1934 in Malabar, Kerala. Kamala's love for writing sprouted at a very early young age of 14 years. Though she had an impeccable command over Malayalam and English language but found an instinctive inclination towards English as a medium for her expression. She was one of the Confessional Poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and many others. Das was married at an early age of 15 years, which made a great impact on her poetry. Kamala Das is the First Indian woman who wrote very openly on Love and Sex. Her poems have a touch of true love, sex, isolation, sufferings and also quest for identity. Her poems are not only subjective but also have elements of her autobiography in it. Kamala Das used a pen name “Madhavikutty”. Das has also written her autobiography “My Story” in which she has honestly expressed all that she has faced and also very frankly accepted all the extramarital affairs she had. She writes autobiographically, “All the pain unexpressed and the sad tales left untold made me recklessly and in protest.” Being unloved made her a feminist writer.

“I’m hiding”: Using the Stories-Around-Poems to Explore the Role of Vulnerability in Today’s University Classrooms

This self-study examines the authors’ attempts to use narrative to create impactful and transformational learning experiences. The essay describes a process of auto-ethnographic inquiry during which the researchers explored critical incidents related to their use of stories in university classrooms. Further discussion of these experiences led to the creation of two individual poems that deepened our appreciation for the rich connections between narratives and confessional poetry. By using these research tools, the authors explore the role of vulnerability and self-disclosure in the creation of meaningful classroom encounters.

Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison

Reviewed by: Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire by Kay Redfield Jamison Jeffrey Berman (bio) Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire. Kay Redfield Jamison. New York: Knopf, 2017. 532 pp. Kay Redfield Jamison's magisterial Robert Lowell: Setting the River on Fire reveals two stories: the one she tells, about the most famous American postwar poet, who struggled with severe manic-depressive illness throughout his adult life, and the other she does not tell, about her own battle with the same mood disorder. The two stories, stitched seamlessly together, are both fascinating. Robert Lowell (1917–1977) was the early major figure behind the Confessional poetry movement, later joined by two of his Boston University students, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Lowell's Life Studies, one of the transformative poetry volumes of the twentieth century, won the 1960 National Book Award. Two other poetry volumes, Lord Weary's Castle and The Dolphin, earned Pulitzer Prizes in 1947 and 1974, respectively. Lowell served as the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, an appointment now called the U.S. Poet Laureate, from 1947–1948. He was one of the few poets to appear on the cover of Time magazine, in June 1967, where he was hailed as the "best American poet of his generation." Lowell was born into an illustrious Boston family that included on his paternal side the poets James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) and Amy Lowell (1874–1925), also a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and on his maternal side the Calvinist fire-and-brimstone theologian Jonathan Edwards and the Puritan preacher and poet Anne Hutchinson. Serious mental instability affected both sides of Lowell's family. He suffered sixteen psychotic breaks, beginning in his early thirties, resulting in prolonged hospitalizations, many of which occurred at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, where, according to Jamison's research, his great-great-grandmother (James Russell Lowell's mother) had also been institutionalized a century earlier. Madness was the overwhelming fear in Lowell's life, [End Page 105] but rather than concealing his psychiatric breakdowns, he frequently wrote about them, both to destigmatize mental illness and to show how his creativity was allied to his mercurial moods. Madness became, as Jamison demonstrates, a driving force behind his poetry. No one is better qualified to write about manic-depressive illness than Jamison. She is the Dalio Family Professor in Mood Disorders and a professor of psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she has taught since the mid-1980s. She is the coauthor, with the psychiatrist Frederick K. Goodwin, of Manic-Depressive Illness, first published in 1990 and republished in a second edition in 2007 with the subtitle: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression. Over twelve hundred pages long, the tome is still regarded as the standard medical text on the subject. Jamison's second book, Touched with Fire: Manic-Depressive Illness and the Artistic Temperament (1993), remains the single best study of the relationship between mood disorders and creativity. Not until her third book, however, the searing memoir An Unquiet Mind (1995), did Jamison write about her own history of manic depression and close encounter with suicide. Her spousal loss memoir, Nothing Was the Same (2009), is a heartfelt tribute to the memory of her husband, Dr. Richard Wyatt, a noted schizophrenia researcher who died of cancer in 2002 at age sixty-three. A recipient in 2001 of a MacArthur Fellowship, Jamison has earned several major awards, including being chosen by Time magazine as a "Hero of Medicine." In Robert Lowell, Jamison's luminous prose and the metaphorical power of her language reveal her own poetic side. Her book on Lowell is about "fire in the blood and darkness; it is about mania and the precarious, deranging altitude to which mania ascends. It is about the poetic imagination and how mania and imagination come together to create great art. But it is as much and more about the vital role of discipline and character in making art from inborn gift" (p. 4). She could have been describing herself. Jamison focuses on a single poet, but her book is, in a larger sense, a study of poetry's...

Henry House or The White House: The Political John Berryman

For several decades now, John Berryman (1914-1972) has been classified as a Confessional poet; a categorization that has nonetheless been used dismiss his claims concern. Critics as diverse as M. L. Rosenthal, Bruce Bawer, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Hofmann, Joel Conarroe, Luke Spencer, and many others have been persistent in censuring Berryman as a poet who lacks broader social and political scopes; who expresses his own confusion and irresolution in face of current events; who cannot make things cohere on level of international politics any more than he can on level of his own life; and who fails to become poet he wanted be. Besides, critics claim, that even when Berryman is overtly political by any definition, his words lack real significance or resonance, and his writings are hollow or failed gestures. As confusion between and public in John Berryman's poetry has always puzzled critics and readers alike, this essay attempts resolve this critical debate in his works. The essay examines The Dream Songs and life they represent in larger context of Berryman's country and period—America in middle forty years of twentieth century—to demonstrate that, against that backdrop, poems are political at profoundest level, where the personal is political. The essay also shows that Berryman, like Henry, his alterego in Dream Songs, broke silence of his personal despair make poetry of it; poems in which personal and spiritual dilemmas are brought together with political events that are evidence of his entire nation's moral and spiritual difficulties.

The Nature in the Confessional Poetry of Kim Soo-young and Theodore Roethke

The Nature in the Confessional Poetry of Kim Soo-young and Theodore Roethke

Confessional Poetry and the Materialisation of an Autobiographical Self

ABSTRACTLittle has been said about what happens when the writing subject cobbles together a self from the material of language in an always-unpredictable creative experiment. This is undoubtedly in part because life-writing scholars are not conventionally life-writing practitioners. In this article, informed by my experience writing confessional poetry and by socio-material scholars of creativity such as Vlad-Petre Glăveneau, I explore how the technologies of poetic language – bearing affordances and constraints, embodying social and cultural histories, and therefore exerting their own intentionality – are exercised in the creative act, giving rise to a phenomenological alienation of the autobiographical subject that is often explained in terms of unconscious forces or ‘madness’. I begin by discrediting myths linking creativity and mental illness in order to destabilise a traditional view of confessional poetry as generated by individual pathology, before going on to theorise the phenomenological lacuna in authorial subjectivity that such myths represent in relation to the potent technologies of poiesis. Ultimately, this article argues that confessional poetry arises from a distributed socio-material practice in which the agency of the author is negotiated through the agency of writing materials in the creation of autobiographical artefacts, thus exposing another limit in the field of life writing.

The Personal is Political: A Comparative Study of Contemporary Chinese and American Confessional Poetry

Abstract This article looks into the making of a Chinese confessional poetics, especially of a discourse of women's poetry, in interaction with American confessional poetry, as a cross-cultural literary construct. I am arguing that both Chinese and American confessional poetry feature both as aesthetic categories in particular intracultural and intercultural contexts and as manifestations of personal politics. American and Chinese confessional poetry can indeed be read as a showcase of politicized self-expression at odds with established powers. The author is particularly interested in how the confessional discourse relates to the acts of self-positioning, self-defining, self-articulating, and self-interpreting and in how these Chinese and American confessional poets wrestle with politics to carve out a discursive space of their own, on the margins of the sociopolitical domain.

Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das as Confessional Poets

The dawn of the twentieth century witnessed changes in every aspect of the day-to-day lives of women, from domestic sphere to public. Despite many challenges, women came up with their profound works. Women in the early twentieth century were more active and influential as writers and artists. This research paper shows how Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das contributed in the twentieth century through their tremendous writings. Sylvia Plath and Kamala Das addressed their private experiences and feelings about death, trauma, depression and relationships in confessional poetry, or very often in an autobiographical manner. During the twentieth century, Indian writing in English had also gained recognition rapidly in the society. In their writings, they have started questioning the prominent old patriarchal domination. To an extent, they are no longer puppets in the hands of man. Theyhave shown their talent and proved it worth in both ways qualitatively and quantitatively in the field of literature and are proving it even today without any obstacle. Works of women have left prints on the lives of many readers, and it also brought change in the society.

МОТИВНАЯ СТРУКТУРА ЖЕНСКОГО МИРА В ПОЭЗИИ СИЛЬВИИ ПЛАТ

This paper dwells on the analysis of the motif complex of women world in Sylvia Plath’s poetry (1932-1963) - the American poet, the representative of “Confessional Poetry” and mostly feministic author. The motif complex of women world tends to be the greatest part of the poetic heritage of Sylvia Plath. It consists of more than 10 interlaced motifs: anti-patriarchal rebellion, “creatoress”, motherhood, etc. The motif analysis gives an opportunity to trace the correlation of the “inner” and the “outer”, the “common” and the “individual”, and reveal the semantic links between Plath’s poetic texts.

History and Daddy: The Politics of Autobiographism in Polina Barskova’s ‘Proshchatel’’

In her latest poetry and prose, Polina Barskova addresses the subject of her critical writings, namely, the cultural-political dimensions of the siege of Leningrad. In all these writings, she pursues a critique of Soviet and post-Soviet mythologies surrounding this historical event. In her prose piece ‘Proshchatel’’ (‘The Forgiver’), from Zhivye kartiny (Tableaux vivants), Barskova employs autobiography as an element of critique, invoking and renovating Russian modernist precedents. In so doing, she shapes a new kind of autobiographism which has commonalities with American confessional poetry and theorizing of identity.

Unburdening the self: a therapeutic study of Kamala Das’s “Composition”

ABSTRACTOf all the Indian English Poets, Kamala Das (1934–2009) has achieved a significant position as a pioneer confessional poet writing in the same vein like her American counterparts like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. She suffered a mismatched marital life leading her even to an attempt to commit suicide. Her husband, instead of providing a romantic ambience, engages himself in the continuous distancing by maintaining a cold relationship towards her. He considered her just as an object of carnal gratification. This attitude completely frustrated her. However, it will be my endeavor to show that it was the act of writing poems which helped her to get out of that claustrophobic situation. Poems gave her a therapeutic relief. In the presentation of this study, I have chosen a major poem “Composition” in this regard. She has used the mode of confession in her poems to achieve therapeutic value.