Confessional Poetry

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Confessional poetry (from English confession , "confession", "confession", " confession " and English poetry for "poetry", "poetry") describes poetic works that contain intimate, often unflattering details from the life of the poet or the Address poet in an accentuated way, such as mental illness or sexual experiences.

A characteristic of this form of poetry is the small distance between the person depicted in the respective poem and the author of the poem. This specific sub-genre of lyric poetry has its first origins in the poetry of the Romantics , who focus on the exploration and poetic design of one's own subjective emotional world of experience and sensation. Poems such as Nutting by William Wordsworth , Dejection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Ode to the West Wind (" I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed ") by Percy Bysshe Shelley can be regarded as precursors of modern confessional poetry . Further references in literary history can also be made to lyrical works such as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock by TS Eliot or Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and The Pisan Cantos by Ezra Pound .

The term was first used in 1959 by the literary critic Macha Rosenthal in a review of the prose and poetry collection Life Studies by Robert Lowell , in which Lowell tried, among other things, to psychoanalytically interpret his disturbed family relationships and reveals the confrontation with his own manic-depressive illness.

The term “ Confessional Poet ” was subsequently assigned to numerous writers, especially from the 1950s and 1960s. John Berryman , Allen Ginsberg , Robert Lowell , Sylvia Plath , Theodore Roethke , Anne Sexton, and WD Snodgrass have all been referred to as Confessional Poets . The American poets Maxine Kumin and Diane Wakoski were also close to the group of Confessional Poets . Sharon Olds has also been one of the poets who have deliberately written confessionally since the early 1980s , whose focus, under the influence of Ginsberg, is increasingly on taboo topics such as experiencing one's own sexuality or experiencing violence and abuse in one's own family.

Some key texts of the American Confessional School of Poetry include Lowell's Life Studies , Plath's Ariel , Berryman's The Dream Songs , Snodgrass' Heart's Needle , and Sextons To Bedlam and Part Way Back .

literature

  • Robert S. Phillips: The Confessional Poets (Crosscurrents / Modern Critiques). Southern Illinois University Press 1973, ISBN 978-0809-30642-8 .
  • Martin Dodsworth (Ed.): The Survival of Poetry: A Contemporary Survey. Faber Verlag 1970, ISBN 978-0571-09057-0 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Philip Hobsbaum: Confessional Poetry . In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literature , July 2017, published online at [1] . Retrieved March 4, 2018.
  2. ↑ See Confessional poetry ( Memento of the original from May 18, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. and Robert Lowell . On: Poetry Foundation . Retrieved May 15, 2015. See also Alfred Hornung: Confessional Poets . In: Hubert Zapf : American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart a. Weimar, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 315-317, here p. 316. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.poetryfoundation.org
  3. ↑ See Philip Hobsbaum: Confessional Poetry . In: Oxford Research Encyclopedias - Literaure , July 2017, published online at [2] . Retrieved March 4, 2018.
  4. ↑ See Sharon Olds: Blood, sweat and fears . In: The Independent , October 27, 2006. Retrieved May 17, 2015. See also Sharon Olds' own statements about her work from an interview, cited in Fine Print: Poet Sharon Olds Chronicles the End of Her Marriage in a New Collection . In: Vogue , September 2012. Retrieved May 15, 2015.
  5. ↑ See Alfred Hornung: Confessional Poets . In: Hubert Zapf : American literary history . Metzler Verlag, 2nd act. Edition, Stuttgart a. Weimar, ISBN 3-476-02036-3 , pp. 315-317.