What makes confessional poetry interesting, unique and worthy of exploration is its debatable character drawing on the misconception that surrounds the fusion of artistic practice with personal experience. Some critics take this kind of poetry to be a hysterical melodrama, rather than a qualitative literary exposition of thought, emotion and experience. That is an ambiguous fallacy, especially created when someone is first exposed to a confessional poetic specimen. Several queries may possibly appear, such as: why would someone bother to read confessional poetry?

What makes it different or distinguishes it from all the other poetic genres? In order to answer these questions and justify its qualitative value, it is absolutely necessary to bring forward the fact that this poetic genre is often associated with autobiographical writing, because the Self is often the protagonist, expressing itself in a frank and fearless manner. We should also notify that autobiography itself is a complex subject area. As a result, because of this “complexity,” Charles Gullans for example, is blatantly against Anne Sexton’s literal confession, because her poetry “was the product of anguish” (qtd. in Arbor 148). The above argumentation resonates with a satisfying number of critics who take confessionalism to be a modern form of psychiatry, wherein the experience communicated is painful, insolent and embarrassing for the reader (148). Undoubtedly, this is not the case here; although confessional poetry is that of suffering, readers are able to appreciate its authenticity and artistic quality. Confessional artists not only transfer and interpret reality through their naked emotional directness but also they go beyond any socio-cultural limits so as to come to something superior and fearless. Unquestionably, confessionalism is about revealing openly tormented and everyday issues that will proportionally drive readers discover their own self.

The poetesses to be examined here are Anne Sexton and Sharon Olds. The former is taken to be one of the most significant representatives of the confessional poetic trend in the 60s ─she was legitimately called the mother of the confessional school (George 90) ─ while the latter represents the confessional poetry trends in the 80s. The poems that will be commented on in this piece belong to the following poetic collections: Love Poems (1967) and Live or Die (1966) by Anne Sexton, and The Dead and the Living (1975) by Sharon Olds.

As it is already mentioned, confessional poetry is that of suffering, for it frequently highlights the emotional breakdown and paranoia of the writers (Arbor 65). For example, Sexton resulted in using poetry as a psychiatric method in order to achieve a form of personal catharsis, to avoid mental disorders and suicides. Robert Phillips claims that “Confession is good for the soul” (2); however, this kind of poetry should provide an escape from an emotion, an “escape from personality” and not an expression of personality (5). In contradiction, Sexton predicated that any form of poetry is cathartic, but unfortunately cannot solve problems, since they are written down (12). What is important in this case by writing poetry is that the authors are able to disclose thorny problems which most people would not venture to articulate openly. In 1959, M. L. Rosenthal first used the term “confessional” referring to Robert Lowell’s poetry collection, Life Studies (1959) and, undoubtedly argues that confessional poetry has its roots in the general ancient world, referring to Sappho, Catullus and other great authors and poets. Since “there have always been confessional poets” (Phillips 2) we reach the conclusion that confessional writing is a more extrovert way to share someone’s thoughts. That is artlessly the main reason why it is written in the everyday language and explores subjectivity (Philips 16). In simple words, confessional writers do transfer and interpret reality through their intensely articulated personal themes. Furthermore, for one to appreciate the stages confessional poetry has gone through in post-1945 U.S., one is necessary to take into consideration the various socio-political events that took place the period between 1960s-1980s. The 60s was an era of various notable movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement, the Civil Rights Act, regarding the racial discrimination against the Blacks, the Feminist Movement, the Vietnam War, and finally the Cold War. Undoubtedly, the postwar period altered radically people’s lives and thoughts. People plainly tried to go after the pursuit of their personal freedom and self-expression (Baym 2083).

Nina Baym vindicates that “[l]iterature in the 1960s […] was often extreme in its methods and disruptive in its effects” (2089). In relation to females, this decade can be characterized as the very beginnings of the second wave of feminism. Still, women could not speak openly about their sexuality or about their feminine anxieties, because these were considered to be taboo subjects. As for Sexton, it could be claimed that she “did grow in the direction of feminism” (Hall 91), speaking pointedly about the multidimensional role of the mid-twentieth century woman and bringing the problem of the contemporary American female to full attention. In her collection Live or Die, Sexton presents the struggle between life and death seen from the perspective of psychological disorders and addiction often interpreted as “physical sex, masturbation and adultery” (Hall 80), which made this collection too extreme for the audience of the time.

In the poem “Menstruation at Forty,” she highlights the contradiction that there is between female desire and social conventions with the pains of motherhood still being a taboo issue to discuss openly at the time. The autobiographical elements of this poetic piece are obvious, making this poem too extreme, blunt and outspoken for the male audience of the era: “I myself will die without baptism, / a third daughter they didn’t bother. / My death will come on my name day” (32-34), continuing with the actual description of the menstruation procedure:

blood worn like a corsage
to bloom
one on left and one on the right-
It’s a warm room, the place of the blood. (45-49)

According to the poetess, menstruation is a “red disease-”, which comes “year after year” in order to fulfill its goal of procreation. Actually, the poem is written on the 7th of November, just a couple of days before Sexton’s birthday on the 9th. Due to the feeling of getting old and the inability of her body to obey to her maternal needs or instincts, she is motivated to write about the experience of motherhood, which seems to be fading away: “All this without you- / two days gone in blood. / I myself die without baptism” (30-32). The poem ends with the following lines:

full and disheveled, hissing into the night,
never growing old,
waiting always for you on the porch…
year after year,
my carrot, my cabbage, (56-60)

In these lines, Sexton reveals her dependency on her unborn child since its birth appears to be vital for own life, suggesting that the wish of having this child ─“The never acquired, / the never seeded or unfastened, / you of the genitals I feared” (16-18)─ is unrealized. The adverbs “always” and “never” heighten the persona’s pain and disappointment as she is now doomed to non-existence. Hence, “Menstruation at forty” describes the persona’s biological, and to an extent, social “death” due to her inability to procreate which highlights as well as explains the rejection she experiences from her social milieu.

In the poem “For My Lover, Returning to His Wife,” being part of the Love Poem collection, Sexton deals with the theme of adultery, which she manipulates in her own unique way by recreating in her poem the atmosphere of a love triangle: “I give you back your heart. / I give you permission─” (29-30). The left-behind poetess is unable to “strive,” to react or even to seek revenge. Moreover, the poem appears to be divided into those stanzas which refer to the wife and those to the secret lover. For instance, the wife: “…is all there. / She was melted carefully down for you and cast up from your childhood, / cast up from your one hundred favorite aggies” (1-4), in contradiction to the persona who confesses: “As for me, I am a watercolor. / I wash off” (47-48). The above lines offer readers an insight into the objectification of the female since she appears to be always at the disposal of the male. The speaker is incapable of regaining her lover back so her tone becomes ironic and bitter as highlighted by the use of the words, “my darling” (5). She is devastated at the thought of loosing her soul-mate. Moreover, the persona here is precise and modest, leaving her ego aside in order to sustain the objective character of confessional poetry and leave readers draw their own conclusions. As “Mother and Jack and the Rain” ─being part of the Live or Die collection─ unfolds, the autobiographical elements reaffirm the confessional character of this specific poem. The poet’s attitude towards experience translates into an ongoing, direct exchange with the audience. Sexton takes confessional writing a step further by subverting the “traditionally ‘male’ registers of public speech, which are often authoritarian in tone and even polemical” (Vickery 120). In this way, she amplifies the confessional character of her poetry by motivating women to pen up other areas of unspeakable experience.

Sharon Olds’ poetry which appeared in the 1980s is far more articulate with regard to female psychological health and emotional balance. In The Dead and the Living, Olds celebrates in a frank way the “randy treatment of female heterosexuality and maternity and its representations of familiar dysfunction” (Daniels 16). The themes Olds resorts to do not differ that much from Sexton’s and she “follows in the steps of earlier confessional poets [without just copying them] by combining pervasive use of profanity with the similar subject matter of abuse, alcoholism and strugglish relationships” (Ward 4). The significance of her poetry lies in her success of keeping a distance between her written experience and its emotional interference. In this way, she manages to offer readers a more mature and objective rendition of her story, while Sexton is a more emotional writer, importantly influenced by her fluctuating psychological states. Furthermore, Olds deals with erotic love, the classical motif of death, and the multidimensional roles of women but in a different way to Sexton’s writing. Undoubtedly, she is “a central presence” in the space of modern American poetry. The female poet delectates the advantage of writing in an era that all the important and tremendous changes, in relation to racial minorities and women rights in the U.S., had already taken place.

Another reason why Olds differs remarkably from Sexton is the fact that she manages to expand the confessional genre as she “branches out with poetry that encompasses an array of emotions including […] the more somber, confessional topics. She moves the style forward through her topics and outlook” (Ward i). In brief, Olds offers a more optimistic, jubilant genre of confessional poetry, focusing on freedom of expression and enlightenment. This becomes obvious in the poem “Miscarriage” ─belonging to The Dead and the Living collection. Olds “is able to escape the oppression of the past” and enter “into the light” of the present (Ward 49) as evidence in the following lines of her poem: “…and I never went back / to mourn the one who came as far as the / sill with its information” (11-13). In this point, she manages to knock off the loss of the first child and move on with an optimistic attitude. The artist views “Miscarriage” in a humane, everyday perspective and captures in her poem the flux of the moment, the experience in its unfolding: “clots of blood appeared in the pale / green swaying water of the toilet. / Dark red like black in the salty / translucent brine…” (2-5). These blunt, macabre expressions refer to the physicality of miscarriage, unveiling the raw facets of life. The poetess goes to great lengths here in her attempt to re-define femininity by pushing it beyond its procreative context. On the one hand, both Sexton and Olds treat womanhood and maternal instinct in a different and vulgar way in terms of how it is usually perceived from the outside in an effort to shed light on the inner workings of the mind. On the other hand, the means of their expressions differ. Sexton wavers between the lyrical and the confrontational, while Olds opts for a straightforward and matter-of-fact treatment of events. What is more, we should take into consideration the fact that Live or Die is about a constant battle in Sexton’s inner world. Yet, Olds remains solid and unwilling to put an end to her life, as Sexton did. These kinds of realizations are reflected in the poets’ writings. No matter what, confessional poets exist to communicate without fear. How this is materialized though is what makes them differ.

In the next poem “Ecstasy,” Olds shares her experience with the rest of the community in order to relish a therapeutic effect in the acknowledgement of a particular fact. The opening line proclaims the autobiographical character of the poem with the use of the first person plural: “As we made love for the third day” (1). The tone of the poem is lyrical and descriptive, while the poet forces the readers to dare share the experience with her:

…The lake lay
icy and silver, the surface shirred,
reflecting nothing. The black rocks
lifted around it into the grainy
sepia air, the patches of the snow
brilliant white…(6-11)

What we observe here is the fact that Olds focuses on the description of natural phenomena, such as air, snow, clouds, mountain, rocks, hills, lakes. She manages thus to mix the emotional with the material world. The feelings of love are transformed into rocks and then into hills and finally into mountains. She obviously treats the actual praxis of making love and the emotional state of being in love in a rather ambiguous way by placing us in the position of a voyeur. This poem is analogous to Sexton’s “For My Lover, Returning to his Wife,” wherein the poets’ worldview about the male other is based upon various realizations. The poetess keeps repeating the pronoun “we” highlighting in this manner the sentimental bond she shares with her lover:

we stayed with it, even though we were
far beyond what we knew, we rose
into the grain of the cloud, even though we were
frightened, the air hollow, even though
nothing grew there, even though it is a
place from which no one has ever come back. (20-25)

Olds views her lover in “Ecstasy” as an ally in the game of love, whereas Sexton perceives her lover as a dominating, catastrophic, betraying figure who comes to suffocate and control her. Olds poetry is about transformation, whereas Sexton vouches the darker aspects of life. Once more, the former proves that she is not overwhelmed by her emotions ─something that Sexton usually does─ but she exposes instead a matter-of-fact insight into experience. In this way, she never leads herself to catharsis, but achieves some kind of rebirth through self-destruction. In contradiction, Olds is a more allegiant writer towards the purgation of the soul, something that is crystal clear throughout the analysis of her poems.

In conclusion, the decade of the 60s and the 80s facilitated improvisation, spontaneity and non-linearity in writing. Generally, Sexton and Olds were outspoken and reflected a sincere process of writing by incorporating their own reality into the life experiences contained in them. Both of them do not follow the social, patriarchal, oppressing practices prevalent at the time. Despite the sexist containments, the female poets were committed to social equality and female, psychological emancipation. In fact, women in that epoch were repressed under the male domination and carried the burden of playing the multidimensional role of being a mother, a wife and a daughter. To be precise, the female confessional poets manipulated poetry as “an exit from a labyrinth of mundane difficulty, psychological pain, and emotional extremes” (Hall ix). Due to the fact that both authors tackled issues relating to female suffering caused by external or internally suppressed factors, their way of writing demanded a certain degree of wry irony, harshness and openness. It could be also argued that confessional writing gives the impression of perversion, unacceptable shock and creates, therefore, disturbance and uneasiness to the readers and, in particular, to the male readers due to the subject they tackled. Sexton was often accused of confusing creativity with self- destruction. However, “[t]his sense of eternal torture is one of the motivating forces behind any confessional art” (Phillips 3).

In addition, the autobiographical element is crucial for confessional writing. In this sense, the confessional genre quite often deals with personal experiences. The poets are called to write down their thoughts and existential struggles by creating a “fusion of autobiography and art inspired by a desire to understand self and relate to humanity” (Ward 21). The Self is the main source of experience and is chiefly employed “as sole poetic symbol” (Phillips 7-8). What should be taken into consideration is that the personal is identified with the universal and not with the poet’s ego. This statement can also be applied to the fact that the ordinary speech of confessional poetry assists readers to be interconnected with the written experience. This aspect of poetry accounts for the general assumption that the confessional genre is viewed parallel to the purgation and catharsis of the Self; but it is the way catharsis is realized that differs. The narratives of the poems play their part in this form of therapy, since the poets focus on the shocking and realistic details of a traumatic experience. As a result, confessional poetry offers readers an opportunity to evulgate and conceptualize the authors’ experiences within their work. Sexton and Olds did not deprive their personas of the authority of introspection. Thus, the exposure of the Self does not always revolve around the ego of the poet who confesses. According to Ann Arbor “[t]he poem is a triumph of determination and insight, a final resolution of irreconcilabilities that had to remain perpetually suspended and apart” (163-64). The audience is able to realize the complexity and interpersonal relationships through a different, female and inspiring view. Both Sexton and Olds were two distinct voices in the confessional genre and diachronic representations of this kind of female writing in American poetry.

In other words, it is important to mention that the ultimate and final scope of confessional poetry is to create relief, to evoke therapeutic emotions and imply the rebirth of both the reader and the writer. Hence, confessional poets struggle to regain their lost self and document the pain they experience in a unique way that to a large extent appeals to and identifies with the readers, no longer being just a female one. Sexton’s and Olds’ poetry target female issues, even though the poets themselves did not wish to label themselves as feminists. Undoubtedly, their poetry concerns the universality of motherhood, womanhood and sexuality. The female writers revolutionized the actual act of poetic writing and its main subject themes by introducing different ways of assessing and handling personal experience. Confessional poetry is willing to travel the distance between the innermost, unspeakable sufferings of the Self and the most outspoken and undauntable expression of it. Both Sexton and Olds manage to break their silence and reveal a slice of life in which we can discover our own.

Works Cited
Arbor, Ann. Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale. United States of America: University of Michigan Press, 1988.
Baym, Nina. “American Literature since 1945.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 7th ed. Vol E. New York: Norton, 2007. 2083-92.
---. “Anne Sexton 1928-1974.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 7th ed. Vol E. New York: Norton, 2007. 2641-42.
Daniels, Kate. “Gritty and Alive.” The Women’s Review of Books. 20. 8 (2003): 16. JSTOR. 4 April 2011< http://www.jstor.org/search>.
George, Diana Hume. Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.
Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Anne Sexton. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1989.
Olds, Sharon. The Dead and the Living. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.
Phillips, Robert. The Confessional Poets. London: Southern Illinois University Press, 1973.
Sexton, Anne. Live or Die. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1966.
---. Love Poems. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1967.
Vickery, Ann. Leaving Lines of the Gender: A Feminist Genealogy of Language Writing. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 2000.
Wagner-Martin, Linda W. Critical Essays on Anne Sexton. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989.
Ward, Laura. “Sharon Olds: The Progress of Confessional Poetry.” MA thesis. University of New York College, 2001.

Tatiani-Ioanna Fachantidou

BA graduate, School of English, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki