Reflection on Confessional Poetry

Confessional Poetry

Confessional poetry is the revealing of a personal matter or occurrence in a poets life. After reading several confessional poems by poets such as Sylvia Plath and Adrienne Rich I learned that confessional poems are all about a transformation and coming to the realization of something. While reading these poems it seemed as if the poets were sorting out their thoughts of a certain occurrence such as being betrayed by a loved one or death. For example, in “The Other” by Sylvia Plath she is betrayed by her lover and appears to be calling her lover out on his actions. Personally, I enjoyed reading the poems written by women poets because I felt I was able to relate to what they were saying more compared to the men’s poems. Also, in all of the poems the words seemed to flow and the diction that the poets used made it easy to understand what the poets were trying to say. The diction used in these poems made it so the poems did not have any hidden messages. Not only are the poems that I read similar because they were confessional poems but also in the fact that they all seemed to portray a sense of gloominess. For example, in Sharon Olds “High School Senior” she describes the emptiness it causes her to feel thinking of her daughter leaving home for college. Also in Theodore Roethke’s “The Waking” he appears to be questioning the world around him in a gloomy matter.