scholarly journals HISTORY OF CONFESSIONAL POETRY IN INDIAN WOMEN WRITINGS A SHORT OVERVIEW

2020 ◽  
pp. 79-89
Author(s):  
Richa Mishra ◽  
Hitesh Raviya
Keyword(s):  
Human Condition ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Confessional Poetry ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Indian Women ◽  
Robert Lowell ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Women In India

‘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.

Lyric as Comedy

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Calista McRae
Keyword(s):  
Robert Lowell ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
American Poets ◽  
Insight Into

A poet walks into a bar... this book explores the unexpected comic opportunities within recent American poems about deeply personal, often embarrassing, experiences. Lyric poems, the book finds, can be surprising sites of a shifting, unruly comedy, as seen in the work of John Berryman, Robert Lowell, A. R. Ammons, Terrance Hayes, Morgan Parker, Natalie Shapero, and Monica Youn. The book draws out the ways in which key American poets have struggled with persistent expectations about what expressive poetry can and should do. It reveals how the modern lyric, rather than bestowing order on the poet's thoughts and emotions, can center on impropriety and confusion, formal breakage and linguistic unruliness, and self-observation and self-staging. The close readings in the book also provide new insight into the theory and aesthetics of comedy, taking in the indirect, glancing comic affordances of poetry. In doing so, the book captures varieties of humor that do not align with traditional terms, centering abjection and pleasure as facets of contemporary lyric practice.

Truth be told: Humor in postconfessional poetry

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kelle Groom
Keyword(s):  
American Culture ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
First Person ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Robert Lowell ◽  
Open Environment ◽  
The World ◽  
The Fantastic ◽  
Taboo Topics

AbstractDenise Duhamel and Michael Burkard continue the work of postconfessional poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton using humor to explore culturally taboo topics and expand the traditional range of poetic subjects. The works of Duhamel and Burkard often explore subjects that are secret, shameful or unspoken made approachable through tender and satirical humor to turn these issues into something beautiful. Duhamel uses humor to critique American culture and the domestic arena with the clarity of an outsider while Burkard uses humor to write about loss and recovery, discovering the fantastic in the familiar. Through humor in first-person confessional poems these poets create a more open environment where the poet and their audiences may confront the truth of themselves and the world in which they live.

Anne Sexton and the Wild Animal

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dorothea Lasky
Keyword(s):  
Wild Animal ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
American Poets

“Anne Sexton and The Wild Animal” discusses the bestiary poems from Anne Sexton’s 45 Mercy Street in the context of the book as a whole. It also investigates the idea of a feral, metaphysical “I” in other American poets, including Sylvia Plath.

Dylan Thomas and American Poetry: ‘a kind of secret, but powerful, leaven’

2019 ◽  
pp. 197-214
Author(s):  
Philip Coleman
Keyword(s):  
American Poetry ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Charles Olson ◽  
Broad View ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
History Of ◽  
Dylan Thomas ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The Many ◽  
The Way

In The Poetry of Dylan Thomas (2013), John Goodby argues that ‘[t]he scope of Thomas’s impact on US poetry is remarkable, and it testifies to his characteristic hybrid ambivalence’. In the spirit of elaborating on this observation, this chapter considers how a number of quite different American poets have engaged with Thomas’s work, including Charles Olson, Delmore Schwartz, Elizabeth Bishop, and Denise Levertov. The essay also brings into focus the more explicit dialogue established throughout the poetry of John Berryman, for whom Thomas was a constant and almost familial figure from the 1940s to the end of his career. In Dream Song 88, Berryman imagines Thomas in the afterlife ‘with more to say / now there’s no hurry, and we’re all a clan.’ In this chapter, the idea of American poets belonging to or seeking to belong to such a ‘clan’ is examined, up to and including the work of a number of contemporary poets and schools of verse. The chapter takes a broad view, then, of the many ways Thomas has influenced the writing of poetry, and in doing so scrutinises the way the history of American poetry has so often been narrated.

The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959

PMLA ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 127 (2) ◽  
pp. 215-230
Author(s):  
Christopher Grobe
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Confessional Poetry ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Performance Style ◽  
Print Form ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Performance ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Recorded Performances

This essay offers an early chapter in the conjoined history of poetry and performance art, literary criticism and performance studies. Beginning in the mid-1950s and with increasing fervor through the 1960s, American poetry lived simultaneously in print, on vinyl, and in embodied performance. Amid this environment of multimedia publicity, an oddly private poetry emerged. The essay locates confessional poetry in the performance-rich context of its birth and interrogates not only its textual voice but also its embodied, performed breath. Focusing on early confessional work by Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton, this essay conducts side-by-side “readings” of printed poems and recorded performances and suggests that confessional refers to an intermedial, print-performance style—a particular logic for capturing personal performances in print form and for breathing performances back out of the printed page.

Kunitz, Stanley

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brett C. Millier
Keyword(s):  
The United States ◽  
Pulitzer Prize ◽  
Columbia University ◽  
Confessional Poetry ◽  
New School ◽  
Poet Laureate ◽  
John Berryman ◽  
Long Time ◽  
American Poets ◽  
The University

The career of American poet Stanley Kunitz (1905–2006) spanned nearly eighty years of continuous productivity and achievement. At the age of 95, he was named Poet Laureate of the United States, and was also a Guggenheim (1945), Pulitzer Prize (1959), and National Book Award (1995, at the age of 90) winner. Born on the older edge of a generation of American poets whose lives were saddened and cut short by mental illness and alcoholism (his friends Theodore Roethke and Robert Lowell among them, as well as Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Elizabeth Bishop, and Delmore Schwartz), Kunitz overcame early sorrow and personal disappointment and lived, writing poems up to the time of his death at the age of 100. His early work showed the influence of the Metaphysicals and was generally highly formal and intellectually abstract. He resisted the move toward looser, “confessional” poetry for a long time after his contemporaries had embraced it, but critics agree that most of his best work followed his first “confessional” volume, The Testing Tree (1971). From 1946, Kunitz taught literature and creative writing at universities including Bennington College, SUNY Pottsdam, the New School, the University of Washington, and Columbia University. After his retirement, he devoted himself to gardening, and to writing “visionary” poems of maturity and old age, some of the finest in the language.

scholarly journals Bodies and self-disclosure in American female confessional poetry

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 ◽  
pp. SV33-SV56
Author(s):  
Carmen Bonasera
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Sylvia Plath ◽  
Elizabeth Bishop ◽  
Women Poets ◽  
Confessional Poetry ◽  
Anne Sexton ◽  
Adrienne Rich ◽  
Self Disclosure ◽  
Louise Gluck

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document