Confessional Poetry Research Articles

Warren, Eliot, Dante, and the Promises of Tradition

Warren, Eliot, Dante, and the Promises of Tradition Ryan Wilson (bio) Sed fugit interea, fugit inreparabile tempus, singula dum capti circumvectamur amore. —Vergil, Georgica iii, 284–85 In the mid-to-late 1950s a number of young American poets published major books that departed aesthetically from the poetry of high modernism. These well-known books—Ginsberg’s Howl (1955), Ashbery’s Some Trees (1957), Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), and Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959)—established the individuality of the poets and marked a significant break with the poetry of the previous few decades. In this period, which saw the rise of beat poetry and confessional poetry as well as the ascendancy of the New York and Black Mountain schools, questions about what poetry was, and about what it could be, incited a goodly amount of debate. And while—amidst debates about “Pale-Faces” and “Redskins,” or about the “Cooked” and the “Raw”—a number of poets from the old guard, such as Eliot, Ransom, and Tate, all but abandoned writing poetry, Ransom’s and Tate’s former Vanderbilt colleague, Robert Penn Warren, published a collection of poems, Promises (1957), his best to date and perhaps the most complete and unified of all his collections. While the books by Lowell, Snodgrass, Ginsberg, and Ashbery are very fine indeed, one might argue that, of all the books published in this period, Promises is the one that best serves young poets of our time as an example of how to negotiate the past and the present, the tradition and the individual. After the publication of his Selected Poems in 1943, in which Warren published “The Ballad of Billie Potts”—a long, brilliant, and sometimes cumbersome poem attempting to blend the frontier dialect of Kentucky, a folk-tale, and lofty philosophical ruminations—he ceased to write poetry for nearly a decade. And then the poems returned, as Warren recounts in the New York Times Book Review: Suddenly, came a long joyous period in which the very air seemed full of promise. I found myself living in a stunningly beautiful spot, a great, not really ruinous, deeply moated Renaissance fortress, on a cliff overlooking the Mediterranean on three sides, with a mountain in the distance, and there, on those ages-old bloody-soaked stones stood my beautiful golden-haired baby daughter and her mother. So poems began again—a different kind, of the glittering [End Page 136] present and of, often, vivid moments of the past newly discovered. And the core rhythms were different. Even aimless mutterings with which a poem might first stir sounded different. Building on the technical innovations of “The Ballad of Billie Potts,” and on the philosophical conclusions drawn in the early novels like Night Rider and All the King’s Men, Promises appeared in 1957 as a significant departure for the already established poet. Anthony Hecht claimed in the Kenyon Review that the work was “different in intention and effect from the work of any poet [he] could think of.” In a contemporaneous review James Wright claimed Warren’s new book “deliberately shed the armor of competence—a finely meshed and expensive armor, forged at heaven knows how many bitter intellectual fires—and [went] out to fight with the ungovernable tide.” Indeed both the initial fanfare surrounding the book and the subsequent critical discussions of it have focused on what Charles Bohner describes as the book’s “variance with the crabbed intellectuality” of Warren’s previous volumes, and on Warren’s turn against what Louis Rubin called the “lapidary techniques that would avoid all flaws and imperfections.” Rightly so. The poems are different: the meters looser, the content overtly autobiographical. Moreover we should emphasize that the poetry’s blend of autobiography and allegory preceded and adumbrated Lowell’s Life Studies and subsequent volumes from Plath, Sexton, etc. No doubt, then, critical comments like those made by Hecht and Wright are valuable for their recognition of Warren’s technical, and perhaps spiritual, breakthroughs. Such criticism, however, is very much of its time in its focus on the new and different. What it fails to address, or does not address satisfactorily, is the significance of what Promises retains from the...

Anne Sexton’s Confessional Tradition and Individual Talent

Abstract In his influential essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” T. S. Eliot emphasizes the significance of tradition as well as the inevitability of the present talent of the artist. He argues that every artist has his own original and individual themes and techniques that separate him from and link him with his predecessors at the same time. Anne Sexton, the Confessional American woman poet, is a good example that proves this everlasting notion of the allusion to “the dead poets” of the past together with the inevitable existence of the innovative original talent of the poet. Chiefly, Sexton is labeled “Confessional” and is compared with the most remarkable Confessional poets. However, the Confessional mode is not a new movement; it has its roots in the British tradition of the Metaphysical lyrics. It is also manifest in the American tradition of Puritan Poetry. Moreover, Confessional themes and techniques can be seen in the poetry of some Modernists. Meanwhile, Anne Sexton’s exceptional Confessional “individual talent” makes her a unique Confessional poet: the uncommon imperfect raw confessions, the unconventional bold sexual imagery, the fearful and astonishing religious symbols and the excessive degrees of “impersonality” are all characteristic examples of Sexton’s creative Confessional art.

Deconstructive Phenomenological Analysis of Sufi Discourse

This study presents Sufi discourse of Bulleh Shaha and Khawaja Ghulam Farid as a platform to assert the common emerging patterns in Sufi literature. Derrida’s deconstruction is utilised to discover the binaries in Sufi texts and phenomenological analysis to comprehend the essence of lived experience and themes of Sufi confessional poetry. The study reveals the substance of Sufi tradition to a general audience by analysing poetic texts and situates them within the larger Sufi tradition. It would make some contribution to the growing literature on Sufism and would offer an opportunity to researchers to unfold the Sufi narrative.

“Some / would like you to make room, / mother . . .”: On Mothers and sons in John Berryman’s The Dream Songs

This article closely reads John Berryman’s song 14 of The Dream Songs , and argues that confessional poetry is steeped in mother-son drama, although not what critics and readers have traditionally thought of as strictly oedipal. this article applies Jessica Benjamin’s model of intersubjectivity to explore the poet’s identification with and differentiation from the mother figure; furthermore, it borrows from adam Phillips and D. W. Winnicott to discuss how ideas about motherhood play into Berryman’s poetic self-fashioning. in song 14, Berryman asserts the poet’s need to banter with the mother and so discover the writing self as paradoxically reactionary and autonomous. By looking at one aspect of confessional poetry, the writer’s fundamental relationship to his mother, this article argues for a rethinking of the seemingly masculine poetics of John Berryman. it discusses the ways in which not only Berryman but robert lowell as well collaborate with their mothers, represent motherhood as transcending gender and biology, and suggest that mothers and ideas about mothers play into poetic self-fashioning. this article contributes to an understanding of confessional writing as self-exploratory, uncertain of its own status, and mediated by analysts, parents, and texts, rather than as titillating self-disclosure.

Unusual but Honest: Kamala Das and Confessional Poetry

Many critics from India, such as Ramesh Kumar Gupta, C. Santhosh Kumar, A. Selvalakshmi, Z. F. Molvi, describe the poetry of Kamala Das as being unusual, while the poet believes that she writes with ‘candour’ about her experiences of womanhood. Speaking of her poetry as ‘unusual’ is an expected reader’s response to poems written in the confessional mode that transgress accepted norms of tradition, conventions and culture in her society. Confessional constitutes an interesting dimension of women’s writing, in which the poets uncover confidentialities that bond her private and public spheres together. This paper is an investigation into the poetry of Kamala Das (1934-2009), the prolific Indian woman writer of the twentieth century to explicate confessional elements in her poetry. Das borrows this style of writing from her contemporary American writers and employs it as a means of articulation, negotiation and resistance through projecting the self.

Undogmatic, Unconventional and ParrhesiasticAnglo-Indian poet: Kamala Das

The confessional Anglo-Indian poet, Kamala Surrayya, formerly known as Kamala Das (also known as Kamala Madhavikutty wrote under the pen name Madhavikutty). Major Indian English poet and litterateur and also a leading Malayalam author from Kerala, popular for her short stories, explicit autobiography (Kamala DasMy Story (novel), published in English, Harper Collins publication 1977) and fiery poems that are highly confessional, candid and open. Her openness and honesty about female sexuality, her life and love affairs made her a controversial poet but at the same time brought her great respect as one of the very best women poets of twentieth century.

A Painful Turning: American Confessional Poets on Human Suffering Abroad

A Painful Turning: American Confessional Poets on Human Suffering Abroad

“Another armored animal”: Robert Lowell’s Allusions to Marianne Moore

Although it seems unlikely that Lowell used Moore’s poetry as a model, in fact he echoed and imitated her repeatedly. Lowell’s allusions to Moore ask us to rethink this prototypical confessional poet and how he viewed his work; they also show us under-observed aspects of allusion, and give us new reasons to return to influence studies. For Lowell, allusion is a way to get beyond his own style. I explore his relationship to Moore through Life Studies , and then sketch a broader technique the two poets share: the escape offered by farfetched metaphor.

Celebrity, Confession, and Performance in Pentti Saarikoski's I Look Out Over Stalin's Head

This article examines the dynamics between confessional poetry and celebrity by focusing on I Look Out Over Stalin's Head (1969), a lyrical collection written by Pentti Saarikoski, the most prominent literary celebrity in Finland in the 1960s. The collection is highly self-conscious of the conventions of confessional writing as well as of Saarikoski's reputation as an alcoholic and a radical left-wing provocateur. Moreover, Saarikoski's celebrity status contributes to blurring the border between the speaker and the public persona of the writer. The collection can be characterised as a work of confessional performance. Based on recurrent elements in Saarikoski's media appearances and in his confessional works the article argues that the writer's public persona was performatively produced and that I Look Out Over Stalin's Head was part of this performance. Applying Judith Butler's ideas of performativity and subversiveness, the article analyses the speaker's performance as an alcoholic and a communist in the context of Finnish celebrity culture and the cultural politics of the late 1960s. In conclusion, the article argues that although Saarikoski was an active negotiator regarding his public persona, his relationship to the media as well as to his readers fell on the border between agency and exploitation.

“All the long gone darlings”: Using confessional poetry as a lens to view the Western cultural symbolical formations of the female body.

“All the long gone darlings”: Using confessional poetry as a lens to view the Western cultural symbolical formations of the female body.

“Rich Refusals”: Donald Justice and the New Critics

If we must concern ourselves with ranks and hierarchies, we must admit that no one familiar with the best poetry in the English language would mistake Donald Justice for a major poet. He is no Milton, no Yeats, much less a Shakespeare or Chaucer. Justice is, in fact, unquestionably minor. And yet such a designation need not be condemnatory. One recalls what Walter Pater wrote in The Renaissance of that great minor artist, Botticelli: “there is a certain number of artists who have a distinct faculty of their own by which they convey to us a peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere.” And of that “certain number” Donald Justice is surely one. Substantially laureled in his time—winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1980, the Bollingen Prize in 1991, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1996—Justice’s poems seem, since his death in 2004, poised on the precipice of obscurity. While discerning critics such as Adam Kirsch and David Orr have written recent laudatory pieces about the poems, and while Jerry Harp has published an excellent critical biography, few are the young poets—and fewer the scholars—who seem interested in Justice. This is lamentable. Of course, de gustibus non est disputandem, but one suspects the diminution of interest in Justice’s poetry may result from an imperfect understanding of precisely what in the poetry constitutes the “peculiar quality of pleasure which we cannot get elsewhere.” Id est, the virtues of Donald Justice’s poetry are uncommon among poets of the past sixty years, and are, perhaps, uncommonly subtle. Indeed the poems run the same risk hazarded by the poems of Housman, Frost, and Edward Thomas—namely, the risk of being under-read by their readers. Publishing his first volume, The Summer Anniversaries, in 1960 and his second, Night Light, in 1967, Justice appeared on the field of American poetry amid the disheveled phalanxes of Beat Poets and Confessional Poets, among whose bloodcurdling howls his own soft-spoken, elegant laments might have been entirely drowned out, were it not for the fact that, as David Orr notes in the New York Times, “sometimes his poems weren’t just good; they were great. They were great in the way that Elizabeth Bishop’s poems were great, or Thom Gunn’s or Philip Larkin’s. They were great in the way that tells us what poetry used to be, and is, and will be.” In our own time, we have, perhaps, more difficulty than in previous generations appreciating what is great in Justice, as our ears are in the unfortunate habit of paying most attention to what makes the loudest crash, and Justice is a poet of reticence, not one of bravado.

Diminished but Never Dismissed: The Confessional Poetry of Sylvia Plath and Bruce Beaver

the desPeration to enshroud conFessional Poetry in neGativity is remarkable. in its heyday critics called it narcissistic and irrelevant; in the twenty-first century it is labeled passe. According to Alan Williamson, almost from the moment that unfortunate term was coined, confessionalism has been the whipping boy of half a dozen newer schools (51). the legal and religious connotations of confession-sinful, brash, illicit, begging for censure-may be in part to blame. it is also true that the biographical nature of confessional and its engagement with taboo topics such as mental illness, sexuality, mortality, and the subconscious means the poet's life can overshadow the work. some claim that getting mileage out of personal experience is akin to whoredom. others maintain that neuroticism drives confessional poets to foist their suffering upon readers in order to self-satisfy. those eager to vilify confessionalism readily accept the confessional poet as both prostitute and the recipient of the orgasm. Melissa A. Goldthwaite relates the difficulties of teaching plath: said, 'Craft, craft, craft. Look at these line breaks, her use of sound and form.' i pointed to images and allusions. Always, plath's reputation preceded her. students asked: 'didn't she kill herself? How? Are her kids screwed up?' (72). this is how of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has been remembered. sylvia plath is the most famous confessional poet and was a student of Robert Lowell, whose Life Studies in 1959 initiated the genre. Robert phillips describes confessionalism as belonging to the 1960s post-Christian, post-Kennedy, post-pill America (13). While this description may aptly situate plath, her recurring World War ii imagery suggests confessionalism should also be considered postHolocaust and post-bomb-and those identifiers cement confessional poetry's continued international significance.Australian confessional poet Bruce Beaver wrote his first poem at age seventeen as a response to the bombing of Hiroshima. this also marked the onset of his manic-depressive illness. Beaver's work had a considerable inf luence on the development of the Generation of 1968 and the new Australian poetry of the 1970s, but in an interview with thomas shapcott, Beaver said, would rather be a minor world poet than a big Australian poet, and his wish came true. on his death, fellow poet dorothy porter called him one of Australia's least known great poets, describing him as follows:Beaver beat the American Confessional poets at their own game, while revealing the pit of madness under the dozy complacency of Australian society and its [. . .] despite his aura of numinous erudition he is just a middle-aged man who suffers from spring rheumatism [. . .] Beaver loved the idea of the psychopomp [. . .] sometimes he is Hermes, strolling you in and out of private landscapes glowing with unearthly energy. other times he is Charon ferrying you to the underworld.Clear connections can be made between Beaver and plath. Both were highly influential poets. Both center their in post-Holocaust existence, in Greek mythology, and in Jungian notions of the collective unconscious. Both have their craft overshadowed by their biographies and the experiences of mental illness that informed their writing. Both poets are neglected because of the unsettled feeling their causes in the pits of our stomachs.the scope of confessional is mythically mapped by the journey of orpheus. the confessional poet engages us with lyric address, the voice lulling us. We are immersed in the trauma of the poet's personal experience and confront the often-concealed ills that affect humankind. We seek answers and are drawn into the psychological underworld to face our own demons. the poet encodes symbols, which must be understood through biographical, literary, and historical reference, and listened for like footfalls so that we may heal and return to the surface. …

Use of Imagery and Symbolism in the Poetry of Kamala Das

Kamala Das is a pioneer poet of Indian Literature in English. She is a confessional poet like Emily Dickinson and Sylvia path. Her main theme is love, lust and marriage. In dealing with this theme, she has made ample and adequate use of symbols and images in poetry. Some of her major poems such as The Invitation, Freaks, Hot noon in the Malabar, The Sunshine Cat and The Old Play House are full of imaginary and symbolism. Her major symbols are the sun, the sea, the moon and the sunshine. These symbols are suitable, significant and suggestive with a view to conveying clearly her views on life, death, immortality, love, lust, sex and marriage. Several critics regard her poetry including her autobiography My Story as obscene and abnormal but this is not so. She makes good use of symbols in order to convey her inner feelings and emotions. A humble attempt has been made in the present paper to vivify the treatment of imaginary and symbolism in the poetry of Kamala Das which has made her a renowned and reputed poet like the English poets John Keats or the American poet John Berryman.

The Confessional Poetry of Robert Lowell:

The “grace of accuracy” (“Epilogue” Day by Day 127) serves as a credo for Robert Lowell’s art and for confessional poetry in general; it is the art of describing experiences in words, it is the artist’s reward of love, both to the art and to the fact. The cardinal force behind this artistic intention in writing even the most confessional of poems of Life Studies is Lowell’s formal mastery of New criticism stimulated by T.S. Eliot. Tellingly, Lowell broke away from the culpability of making confessional poetry a by-word for limp infatuation, and hence restored his position as an avant-garde poet of the twentieth century American poetry. Poetry, for him, serves simultaneously as a snapshot of life and an interpretation of that picture – a record of fact and a figurative design laden with significance. This paper deals with Lowell’s encountering the paradoxical dilemma of self and self-representation in his confessional poems through which he created his poetic identity and wheedlingly added a feather in the artistry of poetry per se.

Anne Sexton, Singer: ‘Her Kind’ and the Musical Impetus in Lyric Confessional Verse

"This article considers Anne Sexton's short-lived, mesmerising ensemble as a model for the wider musical impetus in lyric confessional verse. It argues that Sexton used the inherent audibility of the lyric poem—in live readings, recorded readings, and music contexts—to create the illusion of an authentic authorial event. Using lyric poetry theory as a foundation, I assess Anne Sexton and Her Kind (hereafter 'Her Kind') alongside its mid-twentieth century literary and publicity contexts, as a means of exploring the reception and efficacy of the touring collective. A key consideration of the article is the array of illusionary tactics available to Sexton's band that allowed her to challenge the formalist approach that had dominated the poetry readings of many of her predecessors. Finally, given that almost no comprehensive criticism exists on the topic of Sexton's brief musical collective, the article analyses Her Kind to begin considering some of the ways in which the mode of mid-twentieth-century confessional poetry overlaps with musical composition."

Recent Poe-Related Dissertations

Research Article| November 01 2013 Recent Poe-Related Dissertations The Edgar Allan Poe Review (2013) 14 (2): 253–258. https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.14.2.0253 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Recent Poe-Related Dissertations. The Edgar Allan Poe Review 1 November 2013; 14 (2): 253–258. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/edgallpoerev.14.2.0253 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectivePenn State University PressThe Edgar Allan Poe Review Search Advanced Search (All of the following abstracts are quoted directly from DAI Abstracts.)Brickey, Russell. “The Dark Sublime in American Poetry: From Poe to the Bomb.” Purdue University, Ph.D., 2010. 3413732.This project traces a strain of the sublime in American poetry from the poetry of E. A. Poe, through the eras of Modernism, Confessional Poetry, and the atomic bomb. On American soil, the sublime turns toward the grotesque and Dark Romantic, generating a number of variations on the orthodox Romantic experience of sublimity as initially defined by Kant. Thomas Weiskel's seminal definition of three stages in the orthodox Romantic sublime process provides a template for the several formulations of sublimity examined in this project. Rob Wilson and John Gery are also important theorists of American poetry. Prominent poets include Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, Sharon Olds, Lorine Niedecker, William Stafford, and Ai. Bradford, Adam Cunliffe. “Communities of Death: Walt Whitman,... You do not currently have access to this content.

Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds (review)

Reviewed by: Stag’s Leap by Sharon Olds Rachel Heimowitz (bio) Sharon Olds. Stag’s Leap. Knopf. Sharon Olds’s most recent collection of poems, Stag’s Leap, winner of the 2012 T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry, tells the story of the breakup of the poet’s thirty-year marriage. Olds, a seasoned confessional poet whose first book, Satan Says, was published in 1980, is the first American woman to win the T. S. Eliot Prize. Olds’s strong, distinctive voice brings to this book, which has been described as “beyond the confessional,” an example of the poet’s full control over her art. These poems deal with some of the most painful subjects concerning her feelings about the end of her marriage, her ex-husband, and herself. Olds has often spoken of wanting to depict life so exactly and so honestly that the experience would be like “just being an ordinary observer and liver and feeler and letting the experience [End Page 168] get through you onto the notebook with the pen, through the arm, out of the body, onto the page, without distortion.” It is something she has clearly achieved in this collection. In Stags Leap there is a wonderful variation in tone from the almost funereal “Bruise Ghazal,” which is not a true ghazal but carries the didactic, relentless quality of the form, to the playful “Left-Wife Goose,” with its use of the rhythms and syntax of a nursery rhyme. But the real surprise of this book is how, despite the quite difficult subject matter of the collection, so many of the poems end with a simple micro-turn, making even the saddest poems finish on an optimistic upbeat. Olds gives us a book in which poem after poem of devastating despair leaves us with a feeling of hope. In “Poem for the Breasts,” the poet uses her own breasts as metaphors for longing for a lost love. The poet’s breasts are described as separate from herself, even separate from each other, each with its own qualities. The poet grieves with them, “I hold them a moment, / one in each hand, twin widows, / heavy with grief.” But both are as docile and simple as cows: … they are waiting for him, myChrist they are dumb, they do not evenknow they are mortal— By separating her breasts from herself, Olds is able to use them as a most personal metaphor for grief and loss. In “Tiny Siren,” the poet finds a picture of a woman at the bottom of the washer “like a girl / brought up in a net of fish.” She soon recognizes the woman in the picture as a colleague of her husband. The gesture of drawing this very small, almost lost image, this hint of a husband’s duplicity out of the depths of the washer, is brilliant. For a book about the breakup of a marriage, there is a good deal of sex going on. Couple that with Olds’s characteristic scathing honesty and we may start to have a sense of why this collection has garnered so much attention. In “Material Ode,” the poet tells the story of a husband going off to an annual event, one the poet and he have enjoyed together in the past. The speaker’s husband tells his long-time wife that she can’t go to the ball because it will be awkward for his lover to see the wife dancing with him. He takes off in his tux, leaving her behind, with a smile on his face. And when he comes home, the poet admits, she has sex with him. There is something raw, honest, visceral, and painful about this moment—Olds manages to avoid, at least in this instance, a kind of victimhood. That the speaker (and by this I mean Olds) reveals a peculiar complicity in her own crushing moment is at once unsettling and strangely liberating. Throughout the book, Olds returns to metaphors of silence and birds. It is through these two images that she demonstrates what she considers to be the reason for the downfall of the marriage. In several poems reference is made to her husband’s...

The Court of Cal

The Court of Cal Fred Muratori (bio) With Robert Lowell and His Circle: Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Stanley Kunitz, & Others. Kathleen Spivack. Northeastern University Press. http://www.upne.com. 256 pages; paper, $19.95. “Boston,” wrote Elizabeth Hardwick in December 1959, “is a winter city,” not the flowering American Athens of literary legend but “defective, out-of-date, vain and lazy,” a promising destination only to those who naively sought “a lost ideal, a romantic quest.” Still a senior at Oberlin College, the poet and essayist Kathleen Spivack arrived in Boston less than a year before Hardwick’s anti-paean appeared in Harper’s Magazine. She had earned a scholarship to study writing with a prominent poet “acceptable to the Oberlin English Department” and wanted nothing more than to spend a year in San Francisco under the tutelage of Allen Ginsberg. Alas, as the apparent ringleader of the notoriously wanton Beats, Ginsberg failed to meet the staid Oberlin standard, so Spivack, “reluctantly, oh very reluctantly,” turned to “the airless atmosphere of puritanical Boston” and Robert Lowell instead. Despite Lowell’s solid critical reputation, neither she nor her advisors had read a word of his difficult poetry, but Lowell agreed to the arrangement and set into motion the defining experience of a young writer’s life. In this record of that experience, from her first meeting with Lowell until his death in 1977, Spivack conjures Boston’s most laureled and learned inhabitants as they wrote, taught, drank, and confided within an urban landscape of poorly lit classrooms, chilly apartments, and greasy spoon restaurants. No stranger to the company of intellectuals—her father was noted economist Peter Drucker—Spivack nonetheless found ready acceptance in Boston’s academic circles unforthcoming: “The coldness of the Boston literary scene was not to be believed, and first attempts to broach that were impossible.” The new arrival’s introduction to her future mentor is a case in point. Lowell had no recollection of admitting her to his Boston University poetry seminar and, as her memory of their first encounter reveals, his demeanor could change in an instant: “Who are you?” he queried mildly. He was eating his lunch, and looking abstracted. I had arrived in a rainstorm, in blue jeans and boots. “I never take anyone under thirty,” he countered coldly. He didn’t remember getting my letter, or the arrangement with Oberlin. I was stunned. As I stood in the crowded office, wet and depressed, not knowing quite how to handle his amnesia, Lowell took pity on me. “Would you like part of this sandwich?” he offered. Eventually their friendship blossomed and “Mr. Lowell” became “Cal,” but not before Spivack witnessed more troubling mood swings, particularly the awkward classroom moments that preceded Lowell’s manic-depressive phases (“Cal’s prebreakdown periods over the years were mainly signaled by an increased and obsessive classification of other poets”). To her credit, she avoids rehashing the sensational anecdotes detailed in Ian Hamilton’s biography and elsewhere, admitting that she distanced herself when sensing a manic episode in the wings, a response that Lowell would notice afterward. For Spivack, as for most of his devoted students, Lowell’s emotional instability was secondary to his critical brilliance and encyclopedic knowledge of literature and history. She recalls that while he “always tried to find something good to say,” Lowell’s “opinions had the randomness of a natural event. Praise or damnation fell equally upon our heads.” Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and George Starbuck, each no more than a year from publishing their debut collections, were among Spivack’s first Boston classmates. She quickly observed that the two female poets—who, with W.D. Snodgrass and Lowell himself, were to be forever linked with “confessional poetry”—couldn’t have been more different in taste and temperament. The formally schooled Plath admired Wallace Stevens; the largely self-taught Sexton favored William Carlos Williams. Coolly preoccupied, the conservatively dressed Plath sat in quiet contrast to the chain-smoking, ex-fashion model Sexton. Where Plath’s classroom demeanor “was serious, focused on the matter at hand, almost pained,” Sexton’s was the opposite: Her entrances were dramatic: she stood at the door, rattling her...

Shameful, Impure Art: Robert Crumb’s Autobiographical Comics and the Confessional Poets

Cartoonist Robert Crumb’s work echoes confessional poetry. Crumb, John Berryman, and Sylvia Plath metaphorically adopt the personae of oppressed minority figures. Along with this identification with the oppressed other, Crumb and Plath exhibit a curious and disquieting relationship with power and oppression

Review: Scotland's Laureate of Urban Modernity

Iain Crichton Smith, who was a close friend of Edwin Morgan's, and certainly his peer as a poet, observed that Morgan 'was no confessional poet,' but 'myriad-minded,' and that '(p)layfulness, other voices, technology hide him from us,' although his love poetry 'vibrates with an almost ungovernable pain. ' ' James McGonigal, who also knew Morgan, initially as his student and later as his friend and academic colleague, with his biography Beyond the Last Dragon benefiting from archival research of Morgan's papers and manuscripts at the University of Glasgow, very much confirms Smith's assessment. It is very valuable in its vivid portrayal of the poet's relationship with friends and academic colleagues, not least Iain Crichton Smith himself, and his relationship with his main lifelong publishers Michael Schmidt of Carcanet Press and Hamish Whyte of Mariscat. Both became very good friends of his, and some of McGonigal's most amusing anecdotes concern the two poet-publishers. One could say that Schmidt looked mainly after Morgan's British interests, and Whyte his Scottish ones. McGonigal also does much to elucidate the pain sometimes endured by the poet in his personal life.