On confessional poetry

For better or for worse, people often tend to categorize other people in terms of dichotomies. For poets, specifically, one of the most common either/or questions centers around whether one is a confessional poet or not. In some circles, “confessional poetry” is a dirty term. For others, it’s considered anti-Modern not to be a confessional poet. Funnily enough, there’s also some debate about the definition of confessional poetry; however, there’s enough agreement that its main concern is with the poetic “I.” Who is speaking in a poem? Is the poet the same as the speaker? Upon closer examination, this is a much more difficult question to answer than it may at first appear to be.

In his 1959 review of Robert Lowell’s collection Life Studies, M.L. Rosenthal first used this term to describe the verses he read. Lowell, along with notable American poets W.D. Snodgrass, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and John Berryman, became associated with a style of first-person, self-revelatory poetry in the 1950s and 1960s. Its popularity has continued to this day and some could argue that it is a primary style of writing for many contemporary poets. Others might even say that it gives any high school student permission to write about a personal experience with creative line breaks and call it a poem, and self-expression. What was different in Lowell’s collection that Rosenthal was responding to? And was it really all that different from the poetry that had preceded it?

It isn’t enough to say that what makes something confessional poetry is that it is autobiographical. This type of poetry also “exposes and intimately handles private, human pains.”1 To a certain degree, and as a category of Modern poetry, confessional poetry seems to reject traditional approaches to poetry that associate sonnets with love and epics with strength. In an article for Poets.org, Rachel Zucker, a poet herself, gives a history of the progression towards confessional poetry. She starts with Shakespeare, who used the pronoun “I” to refer to himself sometimes and other times not. She then talks about the Romantics, who wrote about themselves and wrote personally, but did so by focusing on subjects like nature. Zucker mentions Whitman, whose “I” encompasses the cosmos, and Eliot, who “wanted poetry to escape from personality and emotion.”2 Zucker then claims that American poets, such as Lowell and Snodgrass and Plath, rebelled against Eliot and wrote about very private parts of their lives to wake up the reader. Critics like Zucker have a point, though. This type of writing might not have been as radically new as people treat it.

If confessional poetry must be self-revelatory, then much of literature could be classified this way. And it would also seem that there is a long tradition of writing to reveal, especially to reveal oneself – and especially for a Christian. In fact, it could be further argued that this is one of the primary objects of writing: to reveal. What is revealed, though, is part of the question. Is it the self and the inner life of the self? In a conversation with the poet Christian Wiman, Carolyn Forché says, yes, confessional poetry is about the inner life.3 “What will come to the page is what is deepest within you,” she says. Forché also quotes Jacques Maritain who says that when the unconscious and subconscious are fully aligned, then one has access to all the areas of mind. In Forché’s view, this is when one can write something authentic that truly reveals the world. The word reveal has something to tell us, too. Revealing, at its root, is related to unveiling, or bringing to light by divine inspiration. Writing, then, can reveal the writer to herself – not by her own doing, but by divine inspiration. And in thinking about confessional poetry, which has an emphasis on a self-revelatory nature, it might be helpful to reframe this and consider who is revealing what. Does the poet reveal herself? Or is the poet the one who has something revealed to her? For a Christian, the person doing the revealing would be God.

When it comes to this kind of writing and way of thinking, Augustine is the paradigm. In fact, this mode may go back even further than that – maybe even to Job, who cries out to God in lament and reveals his pain – but Augustine provides a model for confessional writing in many ways. He wants to tell the story of what happened to him and he must do this by making a confession – to God, to himself, and to his readers. To tell the story of himself – his spiritual autobiography – he had to write Confessions. As Augustine lays out his past sins and reviews how he used to think and to act, he also tracks the way he was led into God’s mercy and love.

Confession, as a Sacrament in the Catholic Church, brings people “face to face with the mystery of God’s love,” with the “look of love.”4 Offered an encounter with mercy and forgiveness, the penitent leaves the confessional having listed all the ways he has failed to love, and yet has still been found worthy of love. For Augustine, it takes quite some time to accept this, but when he does, he understands his own self more deeply. In Book X of Confessions, he declares, “So I must go beyond memory, too, if I am to reach God who made me.”5 Augustine recognizes that he must try, with his confessions, to seek something higher than himself in order to see himself more clearly and understand himself as God sees him, which is as he truly is. Later in this book, he shifts in his speech and directs his words to God as if in prayer: “You have walked everywhere at my side, O Truth, teaching me what to seek and what to avoid, whenever I laid before you the things that I was able to see in this world below and asked you to counsel me.”6 It would seem that this is akin to what the poet does on the page. The poet – particularly the confessional poet – lays out the things she has seen and done. She offers them to the public, or at least to the reader, and then lets the poem speak its own wisdom back to her.

In an interview with The Sewanee Review, the poet Mary Jo Salter comments on the way the poet Mark Strand did this with his poems. She says, “I’ll always relish the way the narcissistic Strand took a step back from himself—even forgot himself—as he wrote. He served the poem’s uniqueness, not his own; he dared to acknowledge mystery. That was humility.”7 Earlier in the same interview, Salter asserts that writers who create characters that have some distance from themselves and who do not write too narrowly from the “I” have readers “because we feel included in their vision of universal human experience. The lyric ‘I’ can of course speak for everyone.”8 In this case, the important thing that is revealed is not the personal details of the poet’s own suffering or experience necessarily, but the catholicity of that experience. Something about human nature and the human person is revealed when the poetic “I” offers its own particularity up to the revelatory light of divine mystery. This requires humility, as Salter rightly points out.

As with Augustine, any “autobiography” must be of the soul for a Christian. Along with this, though, it would seem that all true literature, in a way, is making its own confession for its characters – telling a story of what happened and how it reveals humanity’s fallen state. In any story, in any confessional poem, there is a longing of the human person to be reconciled, to be brought into union with others and with God. Like the definition of reconcile tells us, that desire is to “make friendly again” or “make good again” what was once good before the Fall. Nothing shows us this more clearly than Dante’s Divina Commedia, which picks up the confessional-autobiographical tradition of Augustine and gives us a dramatized spiritual vision, or a more poetic version of Augustine. Dante the pilgrim is literally on a spiritual pilgrimage seeking union with others and with God. He must go into the Inferno to understand his own sins, as Augustine did, and then move through Purgatorio and arrive at Paradiso having confessed to what he has done, especially to others. He learns humility, too, from people such as Piccarda. In Canto III of Paradiso, she tells Dante, “we only long for what we have; we do not thirst for greater blessedness.”9 Blessedness, or true happiness, then is knowing who you are. It’s knowing your station and being content with it. Dante comes to understand this – to understand himself and to understand God – as he makes his pilgrimage, which is really a physical version of the confession.

Since the publication of Dante’s foundational work, numerous other writers have taken up their own such pilgrimages, continuing this tradition of poetic versions of Augustine’s Confessions. Seamus Heaney’s “Station Island,” for example, is his reworking of the Commedia, particularly Purgatorio, where he encounters the literary figures he knew, much like Dante encountered Florentines who were familiar to him. Heaney’s poem refers to Station Island (also known as St. Patrick’s Purgatory) on Lough Derg in County Donegal, which has been a site of Christian pilgrimage for many centuries. In part of the poem, the speaker states, “As I drew behind them/ I was a fasted pilgrim, / light-headed, leaving home/ to face into my station.”10 Both physically and spiritually, just like Augustine and Dante, Heaney “faces” himself and his station, having made his pilgrimage and his confession, having encountered those who could teach him to see himself more clearly as he is.

Similarly, in Eliot’s “Little Gidding” of his Four Quartets, he writes:

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
    Calling

[…]
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.11

The end of our exploring will be to arrive where we started, he says, and finally know that place. We will finally know ourselves, too. The poet explores the terrain of his own soul and makes a pilgrimage through its hills and valleys. Saint Thérèse’s Story of a Soul does this, as does Thomas Merton’s Seven Storey Mountain, and Dorothy Day’s Long Loneliness. The author-pilgrims descend into their past sins or darkness and review their lives in order to ascend, to understand themselves, their humanity, and God. Day begins her autobiography by stating, “When one writes the story of his life and the work he has been engaged in, it is a confession, in a way.”12 She goes on to add: “Going to confession is hard. Writing a book is hard, because you are ‘giving yourself away.’ But if you love, you want to give yourself. You write as you are impelled to write, about man and his problems, his relation to God and his fellows. You write about yourself because in the long run all man’s problems are the same, his human needs for sustenance and love.”13 Towards the end of the introduction, she gives the disclaimer that “I can write only of myself, what I know of myself, and I pray with St. Augustine, ‘Lord, that I may know myself, in order to know Thee.’”14 Day puts it well and clearly when she says that we can only write of ourselves. But she sees, too, that even doing this embraces all humanity and can say something about all humanity because, in the long view of things, the personal pain of every human is the same and it is a longing for God.

When it comes down to it, it would seem, whether one is a confessional poet or not does not matter. It’s a false dichotomy, after all. Any poet truly interested in writing good poetry cannot completely ignore the self, and also cannot focus too narrowly on the self. The poetic “I” reaches out to God in order to be able to see itself in the light of truth. The poet offers her own experience and her own vision in order to have it turned back to her so she can see it, as in a mirror, and see herself. From Augustine to Dante and continuing up to 2023, the blank page is like the confessional for the poet. It is holy ground. It is a sacramental movement of the soul wherein the poet lays out what has happened to her and asks for the veil to be drawn back from it – to see what is revealed.

1 Modern American Poetry

2 Zucker, Poets.org

3 A Life of Witness: Carolyn Forché in Conversation with Christian Wiman | Institute of Sacred Music

4 USCCB, “What Must I Do? the Sacrament of Reconciliation and Young Adults.”

5 Augustine, Confessions, pg. 224

6 Augustine, Confessions, pg. 248

7 “3Q4: Mary Jo Salter,” The Sewanee Review

8 Ibid.

9 Alighieri, The Divine Comedy, pg. 191, lines 71-72

10 Heaney, “Station Island”

11 Eliot, “Little Gidding”

12 Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 10

13 Ibid.

14 Day, The Long Loneliness, pg. 11