Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 A new century: from the genteel poets to Robinson and Frost
- 2 Modernist expatriates: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
- 3 Lyric modernism: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane
- 4 Gendered modernism
- 5 William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene
- 6 From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement
- 7 The New Criticism and poetic formalism
- 8 The confessional moment
- 9 Lyric as meditation
- 10 The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-garde
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
8 - The confessional moment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 A new century: from the genteel poets to Robinson and Frost
- 2 Modernist expatriates: Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
- 3 Lyric modernism: Wallace Stevens and Hart Crane
- 4 Gendered modernism
- 5 William Carlos Williams and the modernist American scene
- 6 From the Harlem Renaissance to the Black Arts movement
- 7 The New Criticism and poetic formalism
- 8 The confessional moment
- 9 Lyric as meditation
- 10 The New American Poetry and the postmodern avant-garde
- Notes
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
Among those poets who were inclined to challenge certain aspects of the New Criticism, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman introduced [a poetry] which some maligned as “confessionalism” but others hailed as a liberation from the tyranny of poetic decorum.
Joseph ConteThroughout the 1960s, 1970s, and well into the 1980s the confessional model remained influential with academic critics and literary historians across a wide spectrum, perhaps because it offered a humanly compelling and rather clear-cut way of evaluating poetry. Poems involving daring self-revelation could be assumed to be bold and sincere.
Thomas TravisanoThe antics and agonies of the celebrated confessional generation might be seen, in part, as a desperate flailing of mortals deceived by their predecessors into the divinity of the poetic calling.
Jed RasulaI place these varied statements about confessional poetry at the beginning of the chapter in order to illustrate the extent to which the definition of “confessionalism” has itself been the subject of contention. Was confessionalism an important movement in American poetry, a significant break from New Critical and modernist models? Or was it simply a convenient, and ultimately reductive, critical label used to explain certain developments in postwar poetry? Does the term describe a generation of poets who sought desperately to fulfill their lofty poetic ambitions by means of a self-indulgent display of raw emotion? Or does it celebrate a liberating and daring move away from a pervasive “tyranny of poetic decorum”?
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- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry , pp. 154 - 172Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003
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