Confessional poetry & the artifice of honesty

by David Yezzi
On the legacy of confessional poetry, occasioned by Ted Hughes's
Birthday Letters
Burke
was right!
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[To] stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with
shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm
of thought in his naked and endless head,
Allen Ginsberg, Howl
Honesty, little slut, must you insist
On hearing every dirty word I know
And all my worst affairs? Are impotence,
Insanity, and lying what you lust for?|
Your hands are cold, feeling me in the dark.
Edgar Bowers, To the Contemporary Muse
Earlier this year, the London Times led the fanfare for Ted Hughess
Birthday Letters with this front-page banner headline: Revealed: the
most tragic literary love story of our time. Hughess long silence over
his life with Sylvia Plath gave way to a din of publicity. There were
fawning symposia; prominent first-serial publications; and lengthy
articles rehashing the familiar story of celebrity and suicide in all its
lurid journalistic appeal. Then came the renewed hubbub from critics
on both sides of the thirty-five-year-old debate over who was in fact
the victim herethe silent woman (as Janet Malcolm has termed her),
Sylvia Plath, a young American genius horribly wronged and survived
these many years by her unfeeling husband; or the silent man silent no
longer, Ted Hughes, that great lowing ox of British letters, Englands
hoary poet laureate, and Plaths unjustly vilified and long-suffering
literary executor. With few exceptions, the books positive reviews were
as exorbitant as its sales.
Autobiography has been doing big business lately, and, as a prominent
installment in the series of bestselling memoirs (albeit in verse),
Birthday Letters has achieved perhaps the highest visibility of any,
outstripping for media attention recent efforts in prose by Mary Karr,
Kathryn Harrison, and Caroline Knappand quite likely the latest, by

Lillian Ross, which is just now making its way. As memoirs go, Hughess
story will be hard to beat. A poetry-prize-winning Smith graduate on a
Fulbright to Cambridge meets a smolderingly virile European writer at
a party; she leaves that night without her hairband, he with (bleeding?)
teeth marks. In months, they are married. Accoutering the drama are
kids, betrayals, and breakdowns amid a cast of literati both British and
American. The domestic tragedy ends with the heroines suicide in the
family home at the age of thirty, her talents potential a mystery
forever.
With its built-in emotional firepower, Birthday Letters is poetry for
people who ordinarily would never pick up the stuffand no surprise,
really. The whole narrative plays into the popular image of what a poet
should be: tortured, beautiful, and famous. In a self-regarding passage
from her bestselling book Prozac Nation, the glamorous young
memoirist Elizabeth Wurtzel pretty much puts her finger on it: at a New
York party Wurtzel finds herself in a funk and sprawled on a bathroom
floor; from the depths of her lithiumless despond she compares herself
to Plath and Anne Sexton as well as to a movie star. If Wurtzels
experience is any gauge, for many a disconsolate twenty-something
its a one-to-one correspondence: Winona Ryder, Sylvia Plath. Theres
nothing particularly novel about placing the artist at the center of the
starry universe (or about the artist placing himself there); its a vanity
at least as old as Romanticism. It is this Romantic image of the poet as
a personally suffering channeler for emotion and experience that clings
to Plath and to her fellow confessional poets Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass,
and Robert Lowell. That two of the four were suicides (all were
analysands) cruelly adds to our fascination with them.
Poetry itself rarely generates headlines, and the story perhaps missed
in all the furor over Birthday Letters is that of the confessionals, to
which Hughess book provides an illuminating coda. Hughes is not
thought of as writing in a confessional or autobiographical mode, yet it
is an obvious one for his chosen subject. (Whether or not it makes for
good poetry is another matter.) Confessionalism, despite Plaths
prominent role in it, remains a quieter affair than the Hughes-Plath
saga but one that has been no less divisive for contemporary writers
and critics. Given the lasting popularity of the confessional poets
among still-widening circles of readers, they, and their successors, the
postconfessionals, may emerge in years to come as the most
influential group of American poets after 1959.
More than any other school, confessional poetry directly and
vociferously opposed the impersonality argued for by T. S. Eliot in his
essay Tradition and the Individual Talent. If Eliots credo was upheld
by the New Criticsand by the poets writing during the tranquilized

Fifties (as Lowell deemed them) including Richard Wilbur, Donald

Justice, Howard Nemerov, and Anthony Hechtthen by the end of that
decade the tide had turned measurably.
What
distinguishes
confessional
poetrys
management
of
autobiography from that of, say, the New York school, and from the
lyric in general, is the rawness of its address and the incorporation of
guilty personal detail for emotional effect. All poets use their lives for
poetry, but not all lives are used similarly. Often the particulars of a
poets life provide the basis for more general speculation, which
constitutes the poems bid for universality. Conversely, in confessional
poetry such details can serve to deny universality by delineating the
poet as apart and uniquely suffering. The I of the poem is meant as a
direct representation of the flesh-and-blood poet. Through its
enumeration of sins, the confessional poem emerges as a tragic selfportrait, its words inscribed, like Kafkas penal commandments, directly
onto the hide of the writer.
Confessionalism is a question of degree. What makes a poem
confessional is not only its subject mattere.g., family, sex,
alcoholism, madnessor the emphasis on self, but also the directness
with which such things are handled. Unflinching and generally extreme
in their diction and address (certainly compared to what preceded
them), the poems of Snodgrass, Lowell, Sexton, and Plath comprise a
wide tonal range from sad whisper to hectoring squawk. What they
have in common, what sets them apart from other poems that
incorporate details from life, is their sense of worn-on-the-sleeve selfrevelation and their artful simulation of sincerity. By relying on facts, on
real situations and relationships, for a poems emotional authenticity,
the poet makes an artifice of honesty. Confessional poems, in other
words, lie like truth.
Nineteen fifty-nine was the annus mirabilis of confessional poetry, the
year that Lowells Life Studies and Snodgrasss Hearts Needle were
published. Snodgrasss book won the Pulitzer Prize; Lowells, the
National Book Award. It was in Lowells acceptance speech that he
expounded his notion (with a nod to Claude Lvi-Strauss) of the raw
and the cooked. Lowell distinguished between the symbolic, formally
restrained, carefully reasoned poetry championed by the New Criticism
on the one hand, and the fervor and associative logic of a new
personalized poetic on the other. For Lowell, poetry had fallen into a
staid, overly decorous kind of expression, into which his rough
emotionalism and expanded subject matter were meant to inject new
life. Wilbur, an exemplar of the cooked poet, saw it another way. Years
earlier, in John Ciardis Mid-Century American Poets (1950), Wilbur
stated that

some writers think of art as a window, and some think of it as a door. If

art is a window, then the poem is something intermediate in character,
limited, synecdochic, a partial vision of a part of the world . If art is
conceived to be a door the artist no longer perceives a wall between
him and the world; the world becomes an extension of himself, and is
deprived of its reality. The poets words cease to be a means of liaison
with the world; they take the place of the world. This is bad aesthetics
and incidentally, bad morals.
The questionable morality that Wilbur describes is more or less that of
Emerson, who, with Whitman (I am the man, I suffered, I was there),
laid the groundwork of American Romanticism. Emerson envisioned the
poet as possessing direct access to the divine, as a creature of noble
impulses fettered by the intellect, and as a conduit of pure expression.
One does not have to consider deeply to imagine the dangers inherent
in this excessive form of egotism, where impulse is unchecked by
reason and a first-thought-best-thought automatism is offered as the
highest artistic achievement. The extremism of Emersonian
expansiveness was to a great extent tempered in the first half of this
century by Eliots notion of the escape from personality and emotion.
By mid-century, however, the poetry associated with the New Criticism
began to give way to a wide swing back in the other direction. What
poets such as Lowell championed was a poetry based more directly on
personal experience. Extending Wilburs metaphor, the poet Mark Doty
has noted in his essay The Forbidden Planet of Character: The
Revolutions of the 1950s (1991) that a generation of poets would
then find it necessary not only to open the windows but to break them,
to widen them into doors, and the result would be a revisioning of the
entire house.
Confessionalism, while largely an aesthetic rather than a political
movement, found strong parallels in the social unease of the late
1950s and the upheavals of the 1960s. At the fore of this aestheticcultural shift away from traditional forms (and mores) was that
angelheaded hipster of the counterculture, Allen Ginsberg.
Ginsbergs Howl and Other Poems (1956) set the precedent for the new
sexualized and radicalized poetry of self. In addition to expanding the
possibilities for poetic subject matter, Ginsberg instigated a trend
toward self-revelation (which for him, and for poets such as Adrienne
Rich, took on a shrill revolutionary cast). The critic M. L. Rosenthal, in
his review of Howl for The Nation, characterized this new poetry as
follows:
We have had smoking attacks on the civilization before, ironic or
murderous or suicidal. We have not had this particular variety of

anguished anathema-hurling in which the poets revulsion is expressed

with the single-minded frenzy of a raving madman.
Ginsberg hurls, not only curses, but everythinghis own paranoid
memories of a confused, squalid, humiliating existence in the
underground of American life and culture, [as well as] mock political
and sexual confessions.
It is further evidence, the most telling yet, perhaps, of the Clineization of nonconformist attitudes in America . Homogenize the
dominant culture enough, destroy the channels of communication
blandly enough, and you will have little Mad Bombers everywhere.
(Is it any wonder that Ted Kaczynskis a fan of Paul Goodman?)
Ginsbergs new active Romanticism, Rosenthal later observed in The
New York Times Book Review,
mirror[s] something that has been going on for a long timethe
discrediting by many people of traditional concepts of a nobly
disciplined life
The year after the appearance of Howl, Lowell began a reading tour of
the West Coast that would alter profoundly his early style of Lord
Wearys Castle and The Mills of the Kavanaughs. At the time, Lowell
explained in an interview, poetry reading was sublimated by the
practice of Allen Ginsberg. I was still reading my old New Criticism
religious, symbolic poems . Audiences didnt understand, and I didnt
always understand myself while reading. I began to have a certain
disrespect for the tight forms, he later admitted. Ginsbergs in-yourface rant, while it cleared new territory for Lowell to move onto, was far
from the voice Lowell adopted for Life Studieswhat the British poet
and critic A. Alvarez has called Lowells more dispassionate artistic
use of material salvaged from the edge of breakdown. Lowell, as a
favorite of Allen Tate and a contributor to the inaugural issue of the
Kenyon Review in 1938, embodied the change from the New Criticism
to the confessional. While influenced by Ginsberg, he was too fine a
poet to give over entirely to the barbaric yawp of the Beats.
Closer in tone to the Lowell of the late Fifties are the poems of William
DeWitt Snodgrasss Hearts Needle. Snodgrass, one of Lowells
students at Iowa, included in his volume poems on the dissolution of
his marriage and his fear of estrangement from his young daughter.
Daughter poems sound a tonic chord in confessionalism with famous
examples by Snodgrass, Lowell, Sexton, and Plath. A comparison of
these poems reveals the progress of confessional poetry as it
descended from the ease of Snodgrass into the violence of Plath.

Just as suicide (Plaths and Sextons) marked the end of confessional

poetry, it marked the beginning as well. As a student at Iowa in the
Fifties, a young poet named Robert Shelley began writing poems in a
direct style that broke with the fragmented poetry of his peers. He had
only completed a handful of these lyrics before taking his own life. As
Shelleys fellow student and friend, Snodgrass was taken with this new
style and eventually adopted it as his own. Snodgrasss teachers at
Iowa, who included Berryman as well as Lowell, he tells us, really
taught me how to pack a poem with meaning, and from that its a fairly
easy jump to how to pack a poem with feeling, which to me tells a lot
more. This jump to emotion was a defining move of confessionalism.
In his books title sequence, Hearts Needle, Snodgrass portrays in
delicately turned verses the strained relationship between himself and
his daughter. The poem is meant to play directly on the heart strings of
the reader:
This Halloween you come one week.
You masquerade
as a vermilion, sleek,
fat, crosseyed fox in the parade
or, where grim jackolanterns leer,
go with your bag from door to door
foraging for treats. How queer:
when you take off your mask
my neighbors must forget and ask
whose child you are.
Of course you lose your appetite,
whine and wont touch your plate;
as local law
I set your place on an orange crate
in your own room for days. At night
you lie asleep there on the bed
and grate your jaw.
Assuredly your fathers crimes
are visited
on you. You visit me sometimes.

The times up. Now your pumpkin sees

me bringing your suitcase.
He holds his grin;
the forehead shrivels, sinking in.
You break this years first crust of snow
off the runningboard to eat.
We manage, though for days
I crave sweets when you leave and know
they rot my teeth. Indeed our sweet
foods leave us cavities.
Lowell admired Snodgrasss ability to risk sentimentality without
succumbing to it: Theres some way of distinguishing, Lowell told an
interviewer, between false sentimentality, which is blowing up a
subject and giving emotions that you dont feel, and using whimsical,
minute, tender, small emotions which most people dont feel but
which, Lowell insisted, Snodgrass did. Snodgrasss tact with regard to
the elusive distinction between heightened emotion and false
sentimentality is what separates his poems from subsequent strains of
confessionalism. Hearts Needle employs clean phrasing and a
caution with regard to the poets precarious emotional situation that
later poetry in this vein would eschew.
Aside from its occasional datedness (How queer, runningboard),
the poems diction has aged well. Though its better than most
postconfessional personal lyrics, the poem could be written today: such
bald statements and unmediated self-regard have become
commonplaces. Snodgrasss emotional needs are given center stage.
To know ones needs is really to know ones own limits, hence ones
definition, Snodgrass has written. By understanding needs as
defining limits, the poet becomes the sum of his desires; by
definition, then, he is not so much unfulfilled as unfulfillable. This
unhappy state too often gives way to a mawkish self-pity that
undermines Snodgrass and his fellows.
Another characteristic that Snodgrass shares with Lowell, Sexton, and
Plath is his use of associative logic, which helps to supplant reason
with emotion. While on the surface playful, Snodgrasss non sequitur
leaps suggest a mind buckling under the strain: Assuredly your
fathers crimes/ are visited/ on you. You visit me sometimes.// The
times up. The prickliest reference in the poemto the sins of the

fatherseems to jolt Snodgrass off balance as he limps from thought

to thought over tenuous bridges of wordplay. Its as if in all the
emotional honesty, he can no longer think straight.
Similarly racing is Lowells mind in Home After Three Months Away,
one of his daughter poems from Life Studies:
Three months, three months!
Is Richard now himself again?
Dimpled with exaltation,
my daughter holds her levee in the tub.
Our noses rub,
each of us pats a stringy lock of hair
they tell me nothings gone.
Though I am forty-one,
not forty now, the time I put away
was childs-play. After thirteen weeks
my child still dabs her cheeks
to start me shaving. When
we dress her in her sky-blue corduroy,
she changes to a boy,
and floats my shaving brush
and washcloth in the flush .
Dearest, I cannot loiter here
in lather like a polar bear.
Neither can Lowell loiter on a thought. The poem, bordering on the
sentimental, takes place on the poets first weekend visit home from
McLean Hospital where he has been committed and undergoing
treatment for manic-depression. The poignancy of the closing couplet,
as Lowells biographer Ian Hamilton points out, is increased by knowing
that Lowell may not loiter in the added sense of having to return to
the hospital. In recuperation, Lowell came to sad, worried, always
ashamed and fearful, Lowells second wife, Elizabeth Hardwick, has
explained. This nervous energy that she describes seems just below
the surface of this poem for Harriet, Lowells daughter with Hardwick:
the poem fidgets, restively skipping back and forth between outward
and inward observation. As the critic Donald Davie has put it, Now we
have once again poems in which the public life of the author as author,
and his private life, are messily compounded, so that one needs the
adventitious information of the gossip-columnist to take the force or
even the literal meaning of what, since it is a work of literary art, is
supposedly offered as public utterance. Of course, much can be
gotten from Lowells poetry without such special knowledge, but not
everything.

In the opening of Home After Three Months Away, Lowell sets the
scene with biographical detail:
Gone now the babys nurse,
a lioness who ruled the roost
and made the Mother cry.
She used to tie
gobbets of porkrind in bowknots of gauze
three months they hung like soggy toast
on our eight foot magnolia tree,
and helped the English sparrows
weather a Boston winter.
This account is an artists admixture of fact and fiction. The nurse was,
in fact, let go and did on one occasion make Harriets mother,
Hardwick, cry. She did not, however, leave out unseemly snacks for the
birds; this was the practice of Lowells nextdoor neighbor. Tampering
with the facts, of course, does not weaken the poem, just the opposite.
It is the poetic strategy of presenting them as facts that poses the
greatest difficulty. As Lowell admitted in a Paris Review interview,
Theres a good deal of tinkering with fact [in Life Studies] the
reader was to believe he was getting the real Robert Lowell. Lowell
handled this illusion of honesty, in the main, with seriousness and
responsibility. With Plath and Sexton, such honesty feels more like
emotional strongarming. Lowell, in describing his recovery, manages to
convey the whimsical, minute, tender, small emotions that he
revered in Snodgrass. Too often, Plath and Sexton succumb to blowing
up a subject in a way that Lowell equated with false sentimentality.
A responsibility accompanies the transformation of ones own image
into art. Over confessional poetry, Davie argues, falls the shadow of a
divided purpose: the poet confesses to discreditable sentiments or
behavior, but in doing so he demands credit for having the courage or
the honesty of his shamelessness. Like Lowell, Anne Sexton, a
stalwart of such poetic shamelessness, came to confessionalism in part
through the writing of Snodgrass, whose Hearts Needle, she gushed,
grew like a bone inside of my heart. Sexton attended a week-long
workshop at Antioch College expressly to study with Snodgrass (she
later studied with Lowell at Boston University), but her own poetry
displays a more extreme sensibility, as shown by such titles as The
Abortion, Menstruation at Forty, Suicide Note, The Breast, In
Celebration of My Uterus, The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator,
Dreaming the Breasts, and Gods Backside.

Written in the fall of 1958 and addressed to her daughter Joyce

(nicknamed Joy), Sextons Double Image was begun under the
direct influence of Snodgrass. The long poem incorporates in its seven
sections details taken from Sextons mental disorder, hospitalization,
family custody battles, and multiple suicide attempts:
I am thirty this November.
You are still small, in your fourth year.
We stand watching the yellow leaves go queer,
flapping in the winter rain,
falling flat and washed. And I remember
mostly the three autumns you did not live
here.
They said Id never get you back again.
I tell you what youll never really know:
all the medical hypothesis
that explained my brain will never be as true
as these
struck leaves letting go.
I, who chose two times
to kill myself, had said your nickname
the mewling months when you first came;
until a fever rattled
in your throat and I moved like a pantomime
above your head. Ugly angels spoke to me.
The blame,
I heard them say, was mine. They tattled
like green witches in my head, letting doom
leak like a broken faucet;
as if doom had flooded my belly and filled
your bassinet,
an old debt I must assume.
The poem, published in Sextons first collection, To Bedlam and Part
Way Back (1960), reads like an alloy of Hearts Needle and Home
After Three Months Away. As in Lowell, the poets age is stated, as well
as the poets period of separation from the daughter. Both poets
employ metaphors for psychic unease: for Lowell its tulips in the snow;
for Sexton, leaves in the rain. But where Lowell conveys his mental
disturbance (I keep no rank nor station./ Cured, I am frizzled, stale and

small) with modulation and restraint, Sexton goes for broke. Doom
engulfs the poet at the end of the passage quoted above like some
oozing creature from a B horror film. Occasionally, Sexton happens on
a lovely turn of phrase (these/ struck leaves letting go), but the
nursery language she often used to creepy effect seems willed here.
Its hard to say which is worse, Sextons blandly disclosed suicide
attempts, or the fact that shes directing all of it to her daughter.
Sextons woeful inability to see beyond herself isnt moving, its
depressing.
Sextons complaint later in the poem that There is no special God to
refer to; or if there is,/ why did I let you grow/ in another place, apart
from being a sentimental clich, plays into an important observation
made by the critic Charles Molesworth:
In the poetry of Plath and Sexton, we find not only the subject matter
but the structure of their imagination returning again and again to an
irreducible choice: either the poet must become God or resign
consciousness altogether. Haunted by the failed myth of a human, or
at least an artistic, perfectibility, they turned to a courtship of nihilism.
The suicides of Plath and Sexton come into starkest relief not
against the myth of the alienated modern artist, but rather against the
ruptured gigantism of their own egos.
To invert Wilburs formulation, not only is this bad morals, its also bad
aesthetics. One could argue that Sextons poems are perfect
expressions of a troubled mind; the trick in poetry is not to succumb to
an imitation of inner chaos but to render it as precisely as possible
from the outside, to view it through a wider angle than the poets own
myopia.
Sylvia Plaths poems, like Sextons, poach on already charged icons for
emotional effect. For Plath and Sexton, God was a sitting duck (so were
Nazis). Where Sexton might write She is the house./ He is the steeple./
When they fuck they are God, Plath would intone The grasses unload
their griefs on my feet as if I were God. Lest anyone misunderstand,
these lines are not serious musings on the nature of the divine; rather,
they rely on some travesty of divinity for an emotional lift. In The
God, from Birthday Letters, Ted Hughes makes his own observations
on Plaths dark obsession with divinity:
God is speaking through me, you told me.
Dont say that, I cried. Dont say that.
That is horribly unlucky!
As I sat there with blistering eyes
Watching everything go up

In the flames of your sacrifice

That finally caught you too till you
Vanished, exploding
Into the flames
Of the story of your God
Who embraced you
And your Mummy and your Daddy
Your Aztec, Black Forest
God of the euphemism Grief.
(Hughess poems in his recent collection read like middling Sexton with
an infusion from Anglo-SaxonYour God snuffed up the fatty reek.)
After reading The God, one turns to Plaths Ariel (1965) and rereads
Daddy, Plaths daughter poem in reverse. When Plath wasnt deifying
herself, she was deifying and un-deifying the figure of her father (a
bag full of God) for the purpose of ridicule:
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O you
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less than the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
It is possible to admire the originality, the keening and crackle, of
Plaths screed, yet to remain deeply suspicious of the ego that would
equate filial grief with the atrocities of the Holocaust. Such an inflation

of emotion, to recall Lowells thinking on the matter, seems a

particularly dangerous form of sentimentalitynot to mention
solipsism. Such magnesium flashes of emotion are blinding, not
illuminating. Plaths antic intensifications can feel deeply dispiriting.
In 1958, Plath auditedwith Sexton Lowells poetry class at Boston
University. (The three also have in common McLean Hospital, where at
various times each underwent treatment.) Plath wrote that, in their
poetry class, Lowell sets me up with Anne Sexton, an honor I
suppose, but the two became only distant friends and very different
poets. For Sexton getting out the story was paramount, while for
Plath, a far more striking poet in the end, the aim was to transform the
personal into a private symbolic language. What the two poets shared
was their emotional extremism. As Plath put it, My main thing now is
to start with real things; real emotions, and leave out the baby gods
and get into me, Ted, friends, mother and brother and father and
family. The real world. Real situations, behind which the great gods
play the drama of blood, lust and death.
Reading Daddy is like visiting a patient in a burn unit: the power of
the poetry derives from our realization that recovery if possiblemay
only be partial. Lowell at one point admitted that some people might
read his poems out of a fascination with the guilty biographical
material recounted there. This same extraliterary fascination elevated
Plaths readership, after the publication of The Bell Jar (1963) and Ariel,
into something approaching a cult. It is ironic that Plaths poetry, which
transformed biography into a highly original iconography of hate and
despair, would become inseparable from the details of her life for
subsequent generations of readers.
With Birthday Letters, Hughes shows us another important aspect of
the story, but the story does a disservice to his poetry. Hughes
strains under a divided duty: to serve the poems and to serve the
facts. While affecting in passages, the book most often founders under
the weight of its own biographical and psychological content. Even so,
despite the renewed feminist attacks that accompanied the
appearance of the Letters, Hughes the man has triumphed: if his goal
was partly a measure of exoneration (private or public), then he has
got it. Hes made his case. What he has not done is return to the height
of his poetic powers. This to a good extent may be a problem of
autobiographical poetry these many years after confessionalism; for
the best poets of the late Fifties and early Sixties, and most notably for
Lowell, a poem could not subsist on biography aloneit still cant.