Bodies and self-disclosure in American female confessional poetry

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.

Semantisch verraad

This article offers an in-depth reading of the poetic cycle Het graf van Pernath (1977; Pernath’s Tomb) by the Flemish author and novelist Hugo Claus (1929-2008). The cycle is only one of the many tributes to the prominent post-experimental Flemish poet Hugues C. Pernath, who died in 1975. First, the present article shows how Het graf van Pernath displays a complex attitude towards the genre tradition of the tombeau littéraire in particular and funerary poetry in general. Claus’s poems intricately respect, oppose and transform both traditional formal conventions of the genre and dominant conceptions of death and grief. Second, this article demonstrates how Claus’s exploration of the funerary tradition goes hand in hand with an exploration of the genre of confessional poetry, which has become the dominant paradigm in the post-Romantic lyric. Indeed, Claus’s critical poetic homage to a befriended poet can also be interpreted as a critical unmasking of both authors’ very own poetic practice as a form of semantic deceit.

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.