The Confessional Poets: Removing the Mask of Impersonality With All the Skills of the Modernists
Open Access
- Author:
- Shalkey, Vanessa Marie
- Area of Honors:
- English
- Degree:
- Bachelor of Arts
- Document Type:
- Thesis
- Thesis Supervisors:
- John Edmond Marsh, Thesis Supervisor
Lisa Ruth Sternlieb, Thesis Honors Advisor
Christopher Dean Castiglia, Faculty Reader - Keywords:
- confessional
poets
Lowell
Berryman
Eliot
modernists
New Criticism - Abstract:
- The pioneers of the frontier of new art forms have always made themselves vulnerable to the criticism of the previous generation; however, this criticism often overshadows and undermines the true success of these bold artists. The confessional poets were some of these trailblazers who took American poetry into areas untouched by previous generations and were criticized for breaking with the traditional methods of past poets--especially the modernists. Poets like Robert Lowell and John Berryman used their life events as subject matter for their poetry, which the New Critics thought was bad form. This controversial shift in style won these poets the name “confessional,” a title that many of the poets to whom it refers found disparaging. The label “confessional” gives the impression that these poets did little more than use their poems as diary entries, when in fact they wrote magnificent poetry with the same talent and technical skills that the modernist poets displayed. This thesis is an examination of the confessional poets’ use of effective poetic devices favored by the modernist poets to analyze whether or not the act of removing the mask of impersonality negatively impacted the ability of the confessional poets to develop complex themes and transmute feelings to the reader. I will examine T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” which contains many of the arguments for the impersonality of the poet that the New Critics used to disapprove of the new confessional style. I will also compare two quintessential modernist poems by T.S. Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Wasteland,” to the poems in Robert Lowell’s Life Studies and John Berryman’s Dream Songs to analyze the connection that the confessional poets have to the traditions of the modernist style of poetry. The artistry and insight that the confessional poets put into their new style of poetry helped them to produce great masterpieces in English literature and inspired future generations of American poets to test the conventions of the past with boldness and creativity.