Imagist and Confessional Poetry
"To use the language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the nearly-exact, nor the merely decorative word." According to the Academy of American Poets, that was the manifesto of poetry's Imagist Movement. It began in the early 20th century and, as a movement, was officially over by 1917. Its ideas, however, of economy and exactness of language that aptly captures an image (hence the title of the movement) have influenced the poetry of later authors. Key poets during this time included Amy Lowell, William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound. Pound's "In a Station at the Metro" is a solid example of how Imagist poets sought to efficiently get at the essence of an experience. The poem is only two lines long and seeks to bring into sharp focus the experience of seeing beautiful faces on a subway pass you by as you wait on the platform. This poem, typical of others during this movement, focused on expressing a particular experience with vivid clarity.
About forty years later, Confessional Poetry arose as another movement. Confessional poetry's inclusion of gritty and personal details distinctly separates the speaker, who is generally the poet, from the rest of the world. It is truly poetry of the self-uncensored and, sometimes, untrue. It shouldn't be too surprising, once we consider it, that confessional poetry is a fairly recent sub-genre. It is a sort of autobiographical retelling of a poet's life as he remembers it, and, let's face it, some of those memories aren't too pretty. It must have taken an unimaginable amount of personal strength to be among the first to "confess" that one's life was not as neat and tidy as the American sitcom would have us hope. During "the tranquilized fifties," artists like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath began to share their memories of their struggles, their fears and their relationships in loud, unabashed detail, which was in stark contrast to what had been written prior to that time. What distinguished confessional poets is their radical focus on themes that had been previously avoided in favor of a more idealized view of life.
Explicitly, neither of these Movements directly deals with the theme of fathers, though individual poems within them may, but both of them have traits that speak to the idea of the poet as "rememberer." In other words, poets use the effectiveness of common speech and the intention of capturing experience of the Imagists, together with the raw, un-edited feel of Confessional Poetry to speak about fathers. With these things in mind, one can see why poetry is an admirable and effective way of communicating about relationships. As Rainer Maria Rilke said, "Poems are, not as people think, simply emotions…they are experiences"(poets.org). In other words, not only is reading a poem an experience that one enjoys, but poems also allow both poet and reader to enter into a moment in the speaker's memory. The freedom of spirit inspired by the confessional poets allows the poet to speak in earnest; the tenets of Imagism allow the poet to capture one moment. With these features working together, a poem has the potential to speak precisely about a person, place or thing as the poet remembers it, regardless of how accurate that memory may be. Poetry gives the poet the ability to speak in a way that invites the reader to relate to the poet because they do not simply invoke emotion; they recreate experience.
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