What is Confessional Poetry?

Sean Glatch  |  December 2, 2024  | 

When a poem explores the poet’s inner psyche, deeply personal experiences, their struggles, turmoils, and/or secrets, we might be inclined to call it confessional poetry. Like a penitent kneeling in front of a priest, confessional poetry is searingly honest about the poet’s private life, excavating the self as material for rich, evocative work.

Like any poetic movement, confessional poetry is not without its critics and detractors. Nonetheless, the confessional movement in the mid-20th century includes some of the most important poetic figures of recent history, including Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and others.

So, what is confessional poetry? How do you write it? Let’s examine this important movement in 20th century poetry, with confessional poetry examples and tips for writing your own work.

What is Confessional Poetry?

Confessional poetry is two things: a 20th century poetic movement, and a style of writing contemporary poetry.

The confessional movement was a mid-century aesthetic and cultural shift in how certain poets approached the craft of poetry. Prior to this movement, poets treated the speaker of a poem as necessarily distinct from the poets themselves. (The “speaker” is the person talking to you in a poem.) Even in poems that seemed explicitly autobiographical, the speaker could not be conflated with the poet.

This is largely still true, but the confessional poets challenged this idea. Poems from this movement often drew on the poet’s most intimate subject matter, exploring personal traumas, identities, wrongdoings, embarrassments, and ideas that would have been gauche to publish poetry about only a decade prior. The “I” of the speaker seemed to mirror the “I” of the poet in ways that poetry traditionally did not allow.

As a result, confessional poetry is poetry influenced by or resembling the characteristics of this movement. It is poetry that excavates deeply personal subject matter, with the poet’s own inner life consciously illuminated for the reader.

Confessional poetry is poetry that excavates deeply personal subject matter, with the poet’s own inner life consciously illuminated for the reader.

Later in this article, we’ll look at how to write confessional poetry. But let’s first dive deeper into the history, aesthetics, and politics of this movement.

A Brief History of Confessional Poetry

Scholars of 20th century poetry typically identify the confessional movement as happening in the years 1959-1966. The phrase “confessional poetry” comes from M. L. Rosenthal’s 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s collection Life Studies. Rosenthal lauds the collection’s excavation of the self and how the work takes down the “mask” seemingly donned by most poets in their poems. This revelation of the self in poetry could only be described as confessional.

To be clear, there were poems with confessional elements before this time, but the confessional movement made certain aesthetic and poetic decisions prominent in the literary world.

Several poets of this time period, including Lowell, are heralded as the standard bearers of the confessional movement, including:

  • Anne Sexton
  • W.D. Snodgrass
  • Sylvia Plath
  • Adrienne Rich
  • John Berryman
  • Elizabeth Bishop

It’s important to note that there has always been a strongly mixed reaction to the notion of confessional poetry. Some of the above poets, like Rich and Snodgrass, railed against the term, seeing it as reductive and overly obsessed with the poet’s identity, rather than properly engaging with the work itself. Other poetry movements were spawned in reaction to confessional poetry: New Formalism and Language Poetry both sought a return to pre-Confessional movements, respectively the eras of formal poetry and Modernist poetry.

At the same time, the confessional movement also inspired future generations of great poets, and the impact of this movement can be felt in 21st century poetry, including in poets who more strongly subscribe to New Formalism and Language Poetry.

Elements of Confessional Poetry

So, what do the poets of this movement, and its subsequent practitioners, have in common? Confessional poetry often includes, but is not limited to, the following elements:

  • Autobiographical material.
  • A speaker closely related to and often presumed to be the poet themselves. Do note that, even with confessional poetry, we cannot assume the speaker is the poet: it may be a facet of the poet’s identity, hyperbolized or zoomed in, but nonetheless not the poet in their entirety.
  • A focus on and excavation of emotionality, internal experiences, identity, the self/ego, wrongdoings, embarrassments, taboos, and personal histories.
  • First person point-of-view.
  • Heightened imagery and metaphor, with an emphasis on revealing emotional intensity.
  • Emphasis on content over form, with poetic form existing to accentuate language, when needed, and many poems written in free verse.

The Personal is Political

Part of the power of confessional poetry can be summarized by the phrase “the personal is political,” a concept from the second-wave feminist movement in the late 1960s and 70s. The confessional movement actually precedes this phrase by a few years, but they’re born from the same cultural temperament: the idea that personal experiences are products of political environments, and thus need to be discussed in order to effect better worlds.

The confessional poets weren’t necessarily thinking of this when they wrote their poems. Nonetheless, confessional poetry has that impact. Poems from this era (and from poets inspired by the confessional movement) have influenced the ways we think about difficult and at times taboo topics, including mental illness, gender/sexual/racial inequality, religion and religious discrimination, class, war, and so much more.

This is to say that a confessional poem, and what it reveals about one’s life, can transform the way readers think about the lived experiences of you and people like you.

Let’s take a look now at some examples of confessional poetry, before delving into tips for writing a confessional poem yourself.

Confessional Poetry Examples

The following confessional poetry examples come from the poets whose work started the confessional movement in poetry.

“Mad Girl’s Love Song” by Sylvia Plath

I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you’d return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

This villanelle poem is expertly crafted and reveals so much about the speaker’s interiority. Sylvia Plath is a poet who routinely battled mental illness, and also had strongly complicated relationships with the men in her family and life. This poem is certainly a product of both realities: of mental illness coming and going; of reality coming and going; of the object of the speaker’s desire, also, coming and going.

In short, the speaker reminisces on a lost love whom she may be forgetting. The distance between the love and the speaker’s present makes her wonder if the lover was real at all—a feeling intensified by the speaker’s own struggles with mental illness and derealization. As an autobiographical note, Plath frequently dealt with dissociative episodes which also made her question her reality. Whether the experience of the poem happened to her or not doesn’t matter: the source material is still her life.

Pay attention to the poem’s use of iambic pentameter, how it offers additional structure to the poem’s narrative, and how brief interruptions in the meter spotlight the most important words, such as “arbitrary blackness” or “moon-struck” or “thunderbird” (a mythical creature that comes back in Spring). Also pay attention to the poem’s use of parentheses. The line itself doesn’t feel parenthetical, but the parentheses create a “head” in which the speaker’s invented reality is trapped, juxtaposed against the outer world.

“Dream Song 4” by John Berryman

Retrieved from Academy of American Poets.

Filling her compact & delicious body
with chicken páprika, she glanced at me
twice.
Fainting with interest, I hungered back
and only the fact of her husband & four other people
kept me from springing on her

or falling at her little feet and crying
‘You are the hottest one for years of night
Henry’s dazed eyes
have enjoyed, Brilliance.’ I advanced upon
(despairing) my spumoni.—Sir Bones: is stuffed,
de world, wif feeding girls.

—Black hair, complexion Latin, jewelled eyes
downcast . . . The slob beside her feasts . . . What wonders is
she sitting on, over there?
The restaurant buzzes. She might as well be on Mars.
Where did it all go wrong? There ought to be a law against Henry.
—Mr. Bones: there is.

This poem, as well as John Berryman, requires some immediate context. The poem comes from Berryman’s collection 77 Dream Songs (1964), a collection of persona poems, all written in 3 sestets, following Henry, an invented character who bears many similarities to Berryman. Henry is meant to be loathed, and Berryman seems to be externalizing his worst ideas, thoughts, impulses, and behaviors into this detestable alter ego. Henry is certainly a controversial figure: when he isn’t lusting after married women, he’s in blackface and speaking with an affected African American dialect—a decision some have decried as indefensibly racist, others have described as revealing the (White) American psyche, and still others have called a complicated mix of both. Henry also has a friend primarily called Mr. Bones, who never reveals his true identity and is often in conversation with Henry.

So, this is clearly a complicated poem from a complicated collection. What makes it confessional? In addition to Henry’s striking resemblance to Berryman, Henry showcases Berryman’s worst traits and facets. Berryman doesn’t have to say “I want to cheat on my wife” (something he did, in fact, do)—he can confess to this through this invented character, revealing both Berryman’s psyche and tapping into something deeper about human nature. This is another reason why we can never assume the speaker of a confessional poem is the poet—clearly, the self is such a complex subject to begin with.

In “Dream Song 4,” pay attention to the poem’s irregular use of line breaks and punctuation. There’s a sense of thoughts spoken and interrupted, the poem itself reading like a patchwork of syntax, underlining Berryman’s work as a reflection of the American landscape.

“The Truth the Dead Know” by Anne Sexton

Retrieved from Academy of American Poets.

For my Mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my Father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

Some of the decisions Sexton makes in this poem were groundbreaking for their time, such as the poem’s dedication to her parents, as well as the stark honesty in the poem’s language itself. Death is inescapable in this poem, and, unlike poets of the past whose language might romanticize or lyricize death, this poem is as stony and erect as a tombstone.

Despite its novel intensity, Sexton still makes plenty of formal craft decisions. The first stanza is steeped in Germanic words (“gone,” “church,” “grave,” “hearse,” etc.) which give the poem a harsh, if grounded, feeling. The final stanza is mostly monosyllabic, accentuating the few polysyllabic words (“without,” “refuse,” “knucklebone”) and their own sense of lack and death. And of course the poem’s rhyme scheme further structures the poem, with largely Germanic-root images emphasized in a poem that travels the graveyard.

Pay attention to those images and the emotional intensity of the work. Sexton never tells us the intensity of her feeling, but she doesn’t need to—the mood evoked from the poem’s deathly imagery allows the poem to explore the brutal finality of death.

How to Write Confessional Poetry

Most contemporary poets would not call themselves confessional, though contemporary poetry is certainly influenced by the confessional movement. If you’d like to write poems inspired by this era of American poetry, here are a few tips to keep in mind.

How to Write Confessional Poetry: Focus on Imagery and Details

If a connecting thread of confessional poetry is the intensity of its emotion, then one way to make that intensity clear to the reader is through vibrant imagery and details. These often do more for the poet than simply stating feelings—it’s a matter of showing, not telling.

Take this tercet from Plath’s poem:

God topples from the sky, hell’s fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan’s men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

The details here are intense (though not overwrought). In this religious stanza, Heaven and Hell lose all power over the speaker as soon as she shuts her eyes. It’s a stark, nihilistic idea, and the use of detail demonstrates it powerfully, if abstractly.

The point is to use details that reflect interior emotion, or even heighten it. The speaker of Plath’s poem certainly feels things strongly, or else she wouldn’t have used such intense details.

How to Write Confessional Poetry: Avoid Overwroughtness

The danger of using intense imagery is veering into overwroughtness. A poet might include details that are so heightened that they become unbelievable.

This is an intuitive issue, easier to identify than to describe. But, here’s an example. Instead of saying “I’m sad,” an overwrought draft might say:

After the black hole wrenched
all light from my body I was left
the hollow husk of a self
that only emanates emptiness

This isn’t pulled from anywhere, it’s just an example I came up with. What’s wrong with this? It’s hyperbolic to the extreme, it’s schmaltzy, and, quite frankly, it’s predictable in its language. The feeling could be accurate to the speaker, but when it comes to poetry as an art form, a poet has to be more deliberate and intentional in how they portray feelings to their readers.

Again, this is an intuitive process, and there aren’t any hard and fast rules here. But, you’ll know a draft of a poem might be overwrought if the word choice and imagery seem too far removed from how people actually think and feel.

How to Write Confessional Poetry: Be Ruthlessly Honest

The solution to schmaltziness is simple honesty. This, again, is easier said than done—most people, including poets and artists, lie to themselves, and most will be tempted to embellish for artistic effect.

The trick is not to “be a poet.” In other words, just because you’re writing a poem, it doesn’t mean you need to sound poetic or indulge in hyperbole. Artists certainly heighten certain feelings and ideas for artistic effect, but they do so remaining genuine to their own lived experiences.

When you reread your writing, ask yourself if it matches your own experiences. Sometimes it takes a while to compare the two: this isn’t a process you can rush. But, when you compare your art with your life, you’ll be able to identify what’s missing, what’s too loud, and what can be better worded for your audience to understand your work.

How to Write Confessional Poetry: Speak to Someone in Particular

A published poem has a mass audience, but when you write a first draft, it can help for you to speak to someone in particular—someone you trust, someone whom you want to tell the vulnerable details of your life.

Doing this accomplishes two things. First, it gets you out of your head. If you stay stuck in your head, you won’t write from your heart, and you might also distort your own sense of logic and emotions. I know from personal experience that, when I’m hotboxed in my own head, my perception of the world and of myself gets very distorted. Speaking to someone externally helps focus your poetic vision.

Second, it helps you think more carefully about your word choice. When I’m journaling, I can say whatever crazy thing I want, because no one else is going to read it. But when I speak to someone else, I’m more careful about how I represent things, because I want to represent them accurately.

Afterwards, I can think about details like editing and publication, which broadens the audience from one to many. But, in the drafting stages, speaking to one particular person lets me focus my energies, even if that particular person never ends up reading the poem.

How to Write Confessional Poetry: Use the Confessional for Discovery and Healing

In other words, don’t just write a confessional poem because you think pain makes for publishable poetry. And, certainly do not write a poem about difficult topics if the writing itself will activate your trauma.

Rather, write into difficult topics if it helps you process them. Poetry, particularly poetry’s emphasis on form and structure, often creates a trellis that I can hang my feelings and experiences off of. It organizes thoughts and experiences in ways that simple prose can’t.

Similarly, don’t write into a confessional poem with the intent of publishing it. The same can be said of all poetry, but especially follow that advice here. If you write a poem assuming that the world is soon to read it, your “confession” becomes a performance, and thus loses the authenticity that makes confessional poetry so liberating to read and write.

Write Confessional Poetry at Writers.com

If you’re looking to write confessional poetry and get feedback on it, take a look at the poetry classes at Writers.com—including this class specifically on the confessional poem.

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Sean Glatch

Sean Glatch is a poet, storyteller, and screenwriter based in New York City. His work has appeared in Ninth Letter, Milk Press,8Poems, The Poetry Annals, on local TV, and elsewhere. When he's not writing, which is often, he thinks he should be writing.

3 Comments

  1. Vanaya on December 2, 2024 at 12:23 am

    This is so nice♥️🌹

  2. Amanda on December 5, 2024 at 8:01 pm

    So helpful. I’m busting to use some of these perspectives to help reshape a couple of poems that seem to be in this style – confessional. It also makes me realise I have a lot to learn! Thank you for sharing this excellent article.

  3. Eva Velasquez on December 8, 2024 at 8:55 am

    I am fascinated by your new (to me ) Confessional poetry. I am interested in spiritual writings including of course poetry. Calling this “confessional poetry” truly defines what I have been trying to do in my writings.
    Poetry is after all the language of metaphor, symbols and the various ways we curve words and thoughts as well as our spiritual journey in life. Right?
    Please keep me posted in your future work and any publications. I cant at this time afford your workshop but maybe in the future.
    Good Luck

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