An analysis of “Confessional Poetry”
The Genre I picked is “Confessional Poetry”
1) Find a poem that is from the Genre “Confessional Poetry for Analysis
For this essay, you will be using outside sources to define a period or genre of poetry, then finding one poem that is an example and analyzing it. We’ll be covering several of these later in the course, but your assignment here is to pick one and learn more about it.
After choosing one subject from the choices below, find information on it by using one of the Library’s databases or Google Scholar. You can also use “site:.edu” in a regular Google search (For example, type elegy site:.edu This will take you to academic websites that should have good definitions and background. Write an introduction to the whole paper, and then at least a long paragraph defining your subject, citing your source(s). Then, find a poem that is a good representative example of the genre or period. Don’t quote the entire poem in the body of your paper, but include it attached after the last page. Quote from the poem to highlight significant details. State how it is an example of the style of poetry you chose. Then write a conclusion to wrap up the entire paper.
Choose one subject from either of these categories:
Genres: Beat Poetry, Confessional Poetry, the Elegy, the Villanelle, Haiku
Periods: Neoclassical, Victorian, Modernist
Sample Solution
The term “confessional” was first used by a reviewer looking over Robert Lowell’s fourth book, Life Studies in 1959. The reviewer, a man by the name of M. L. Rosenthal, described Lowell as moving beyond what other poets had engaged in when it came to sharing one’s emotions and experiences. Confessional Poetry is a style of poetry that is personal, often making use of a first-person narrator. It is a branch of Postmodernism that emerged in the US in the 1950s. The use of this first person-perspective makes it likely that a great majority of these poems are reflective of the poet’s own life. But, this is certainly not always the case.
