Reflection on the Confessional school

I chose the Confessional school of poetry to study for my final project because of a poem I had read awhile ago by Anne Sexton, called "The Kiss." I was suprised by the intimacy Sexton conveyed in the poem; it was no wonder, then, that I learned in English class that her particular school of poetry was called "Confessional". Reading the poem, I felt a connection to the author that I had not felt when reading other poems. I got the sense that the poem was written with the intent to sound as natural and free-flowing as possible, though I suspect that great thought was taken in the development of it. Reading Theodore Roethke's "In A Dark Time," I noticed that both he and Sexton used the word "I" frequently in reference to themselves as the speaker. Allen Ginsberg's poems were honest about various different aspects of living; some of his poems were about being high on laughing gas (actually, a lot of his poems were about being high on something), some were about his strongly felt views about politics and others described in details that might make some readers uncomfortable his sexual encounters. Allen Ginsberg is also considered a Beat poet, and his style of poetry was revolutionary.

Reading some Confessional poems made me wonder how they could be written and published without the author being a bit embarassed. Sexton brutally depicts her depression and unhappy marriage in "45 Mercy Street," and it was reading that poem that I realized that this kind of straight-forward honesty was what I liked about the Confessional school. All of the poems I read by the poets in this school were in some way profound or interesting yet they seemed unpretentious in the way they were written and styled. The only poems by Allen Ginsberg I disliked were the ones that were rambling and not framed in sentences; some poems, like "Television Was a Baby Crawling Toward That Deathchamber" were a little too much for me to handle.

The emotions and feelings expressed in these poems had a direct impact on me. For example, when reading Sexton's "Welcome Morning," I felt like I understood and shared her optimism and hope about daily living. Although I knew of Sylvia Plath and that she committed suicide as a young woman, I had not read beyond her most well-known poetry; reading the book Ariel, in which the last, rough-draft poems of her life were presented, I felt almost sick and distracted with thinking about how tortured this young woman must have been. Sylvia Plath's ability to express in her poetry a variety of different sensational experiences gave me only a semblance of an understanding of how much she felt emotionally. To see in her poetry the impact that her emotions had on her and the way she experienced them as a human being made me realize how unthinkably tragic her depression and subsequent death was. It seems to me that Plath was just too emotionally attuned for this life, but she produced some amazing poetry because of it.

One of my favorite poems in Ariel was "Barren Woman," which depicted a reproductively incapable woman as a grand, abandoned museum in which "marble lilies exhale their pallor like scent." I wouldn't want to be a childless woman and read this poem! The skill with which Plath describes and illustrates the bleakness of this woman is amazing. Plath is like a painter of words; her poems actually show something instead of describe it. I got the same impression from Theodore Roethke, though he seemed to distance himself a little bit more from his poetry.

It's clear to me that the poets under the Confessional school viewed poetry as a means of expression and communication. I felt (maybe incorrectly) that rythm wasn't the biggest focus in the writing of these poems, but rather the meaning behind the words, and that is what I believe is the most important part of poetry. Having purchased the Collected Poems of Allen Ginsberg 1947-1997, I feel as if I personally know the man! I feel fortunate that I chose the Confessional school, as it forced me to delve into the poems of poets I only had a cursory knowledge of.