The Confessional Poets


Book Description

Confessional poetry as a genre was first characterized by the critic M. L. Rosenthal in 1959. It has become a potent force, and its practitioners the poetic voices of our time. The poetry is highly subjective, written with frankness and lack of re­straint, and focuses on the ugliness of life. Its leading practitioners, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman, have all been recipients of the highest awards in literature, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry. Robert Phillips, a critic and also a poet, here directs our attention to the genre in the first book on the subject. In addition to the poets noted above, he discusses the work of Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg. Especially valuable are the author's defi­nition and historical review of the genre and his use of interviews and personal comments. An appraisal of the genre, his book is also a guide to new avenues open to poets writing today.







The Art of Confession


Book Description

"The Art of Confession tells the history of this cultural shift and of the movement it created in American art: confessionalism. Like realism or romanticism, confessionalism began in one art form, but soon pervaded them all: poetry and comedy in the 1950s and '60s, performance art in the '70s, theater in the '80s, television in the '90s, and online video and social media in the 2000s. Everywhere confessionalism went, it stood against autobiography, the art of the closed book. Instead of just publishing, these artists performed--with, around, and against the text of their lives." --




Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice


Book Description

<I>Robert Lowell and the Confessional Voice returns to the poet's early works, such as <I>Land of Unlikeness and <I>Lord Weary's Castle, in search of a relationship between Lowell's early poetry and his turn to a confessional style of writing in the 1950s. Lowell's early poetry is often overshadowed by the emergence of his confessional poetry (that develops in <I>Life Studies; however, instead of Lowell's early poetry being eclipsed by <I>Life Studies, a remembrance of his early poetry is necessary as a way of understanding Lowell's evolution as a poet. The early poetry provides readers and scholars of Lowell with a Puritan paradigm and the ethos of an American narrative that Lowell never fully abandons but only perpetually deconstructs.




After Confession


Book Description

Explores how poems have been used as autobiographies throughout time.




Life Studies and For the Union Dead


Book Description

Robert Lowell, with Elizabeth Bishop, stands apart as the greatest American poet of the latter half of the twentieth century—and Life Studies and For the Union Dead stand as among his most important volumes. In Life Studies, which was first published in 1959, Lowell moved away from the formality of his earlier poems and started writing in a more confessional vein. The title poem of For the Union Dead concerns the death of the Civil War hero (and Lowell ancestor) Robert Gould Shaw, but it also largely centers on the contrast between Boston's idealistic past and its debased present at the time of its writing, in the early 1960's. Throughout, Lowell addresses contemporaneous subjects in a voice and style that themselves push beyond the accepted forms and constraints of the time.




My Art Is Killing Me and Other Poems


Book Description

In her novels, poetry, and prose, Amber Dawn has written eloquently on queer femme sexuality, individual and systemic trauma, and sex work justice, themes drawn from her own lived experience and revealed most notably in her award-winning memoir How Poetry Saved My Life. In this, her second poetry collection, Amber Dawn takes stock of the costs of coming out on the page in a heartrendingly honest and intimate investigation of the toll that artmaking takes on artists. These long poems offer difficult truths within their intricate narratives that are alternately incendiary, tender, and rapturous. In a cultural era when intersectional and marginalized writers are topping bestseller lists, Amber Dawn invites her readers to take an unflinching look at we expect from writers, and from each other. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.




KABUL OLYMPICS.


Book Description




Anne Sexton's Confessional Poetics


Book Description

Given the amount of scholarship on twentieth-century poetry, there has been remarkably little published about Anne Sexton, even though her work is considered to be as important as that of such contemporaries as Sylvia Plath and W. H. Auden. By offering new and provocative readings of her entire oeuvre, Jo Gill provides a long overdue critical appreciation of Anne Sexton and presents a radical rethinking of the confessional mode of poetry and a recuperation of Sexton's place in it. Gill makes substantial use of Sexton's archive of unpublished diaries, drafts, correspondence, lectures, interviews, stage readings, and book annotations, as well as a little-known television documentary on Sexton. She also uses techniques that have not been previously applied to Sexton's poetry to increase our understanding of the poet's life and work. Employing new--principally poststructuralist--literary theories and critical practices, Gill offers new readings of Sexton's complex and ambitious poems. She discusses the diversity and richness of Sexton's writing across her career, shows the relevance of the often-ignored later poems, and places Sexton's work in its specific historical, political, and ideological contexts.




The Best American Poetry 1996


Book Description

From Simon & Schuster, in its ninth year, The Best American Poetry 1996 is universally acclaimed as the best anthology in the field. The compilation includes a diverse abundance of poems published in 1995 in more than 40 publications ranging from The New Yorker to The Paris Review to Bamboo Ridge.




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