Confessional Poetry and Mental Health
Confessional poetry is a modern poetic movement of the late 1950s and early 1960s in which the poet usually speaks directly to the reader without the voice of a separate persona. While the tone may range from the dramatic to the comic, and the personal nature of the content may be seem private and often raw and psychological in nature. Poems about death, grief, trauma, and intimate relationships are typical. The three key poets in this unit, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and Sylvia Plath, are some of the best known confessional poets. Confessional poems should feel somewhat accessible to my students; their generation is comfortable playing out their private lives online, having left behind restraint of previous generations and hesitance they may have had about going public with their relationships, traumatic events, or deepest concerns.
The three poets share other connections. Sexton and Plath studied under Lowell. Sexton and Lowell both spent time at McLean Hospital for their mental illness. The connections between confessional poets and mental illness are documented scientifically and anecdotally. The two become inseparable in my reading on the genre and poets, especially for Plath, Sexton, and Lowell, along with contemporary John Berryman. Studies done at Harvard in the 1980s affirmed what earlier studies from the 1890s and 1930s had shown: creativity and psychopathology were present through generations of well-known creators in the fields of music, art, and writing. Alongside these gifts were histories of “mania, suicide, depression, and psychosis. . .” 6 Among these and other confessional poets with serious depression and bi-polar disorder there is even a sub-genre of poems about their experience in mental hospitals. Sexton actually began writing poetry as a suggestion from her therapist.7
Knowledge of the lives and tragedies of these poets is often better known than the poems themselves. Each of the three—Sexton, Lowell, and Plath—are acknowledged masters of their craft. Lowell especially was known for the many revisions of each poem. All three poets were winners of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. It is easy to find online copies of a much-revised draft of “Epilogue,” his poem for this unit, showing such revisions.
I worried that finding poems that contain all of these elements—confessional voice, ekphrastic content, and mental health struggles—would be a stretch. Sexton’s “The Starry Night” and Plath’s “The Disquieting Muses” share all three clearly, as does Lowell’s as a reflection on his fading poetic career, to a lesser extent. In the end, all three pieces fell into place without my needing to stretch connections.
Comments: