Search Results

Today, we may know confessional poetry as a set of texts that are printed in books, but in its time it was also a performance genre. This chapter demonstrates how the performance of poems—in the privacy of the poet’s study, at public poetry readings, and in the studios of recorded literature companies—shaped this genre, determined its tactics, and influenced its style. An extended comparison of Robert Lowell and Allen Ginsberg shows that breath was a key medium for confessional poets, and a study of Anne Sexton’s career—both on the page and at the podium—shows how she “breathed back” dead poems in live performance. Throughout, this chapter focuses on the feelings of embarrassment confessional poetry raised, and the uses to which poets could put such feelings. It also highlights contemporary trends in “performance” and their impact on confessional poets—e.g., Anne Sexton’s debt to the acting theories of Konstantin Stanislavsky and to Method acting as theorized by American director Lee Strasberg.

This chapter describes the dissentions and exclusions felt outside the Elizabethan orthodoxy among recusant and exiled Catholic writers. As the remnants of Catholic England settled themselves in for a long war, the literary field became perhaps the most important battle to win. While history has concentrated on the bloody story of missionary priests in hiding or on the scaffold, or else on the fate of those recusant families (high and low, although mostly high) whom they served, the leaders of the Catholic exile movement clearly saw the printed word as a most potent weapon. The chapter starts by presenting Robert Southwell's tears. It specifically discusses the literature of repentance created by Southwell, and places it in the context of the Tridentine arguments about justification in the wake of the Lutheran heresy. In the process, the chapter attempts to show how controversy and piety meet halfway, and how a vexed language of the psychology of the will permeates both sides of the theological debate. Moreover, the repentance and justification at the Council of Trent are explained, and the confessional poetry and Saint Peters Complaint are addressed.

This chapter looks at the achievement of Robert Lowell as a poet. It discusses Lowell's rebellions against proper Brahmin Boston and other representatives of authority and his popularization of the term confessional poetry. It explains that during his career Lowell looked within and without, devising multiple designs for his articulations and that his style and subjects never stopped changing. Lowell's history and his participation in history received equivalent attention, sometimes simultaneously, sometimes sequentially.