Confessional Movement
Pamela Alalay
Hazelle Fabian
Erik Alagar
Kelvin Ritualo
Definition
 Autobiographical subject matter that is sometimes referred to as grotesque.
 Personal pronouns; I, me, my
 Love affairs, suicidal thoughts, fears of failure, downright violent opinions
about family members, other autobiography sensitive material.
 Reveals the poet’s personal problems and unusual frankness.
 Associated with work from movement of 1950’s and 1960s.
Poetic Techniques & Themes
 John Berryman


Themes-
 Robert Lowell

Themes-
 Views and opinions of life and his life

You have to learn how to let go sometimes.

Life is full of challenges.
 Struggles life encounters

Take responsibility of everything you own because
they all have their own value.
 Helplessness

Never take your life or anything for granted.

Live life to the fullest (enjoy your childhood before
it's too late).
Poetic Techniques-
 Bold
 Religion: Catholic Symbolism

Poetic Techniques
Allusion

Personification

Alliteration

Comparison

Imagery

Blank Verse

Figurative language

Repetition

Repitition

Imagery

Rhetorical Question

Symbolism
Poetic Techniques & Themes
 Anne Sexton
 Sylvia Plath
 Themes-
 Themes-
 Religious quest
 Life vs. World
 Gender
 Imagination
 Mother/daughter relationship
 Depression
 Madness of suicidal thoughts
 Childhood memories
 Issues of female identity
 Negative thoughts
 Poetic Techniques-
 Poetic Techniques-
 Repetition
 Sound effects
 Similes
 Rhyme & Rhythm
 Metonymy
 Tone
John Berryman
October 24, 1914 – January 7, 1972

John Allyn Smith Jr.

McAlester, Oklahoma

Father committed suicide

Columbia College

Began an affair in 1947, married 3 times

Included in “Five Young American Poets”

Wrote The Poems, The Dispossessed, a
biography, Homage to Mistress
Bradstreet,The Dream Songs, His Toy, His
Dream, His Rest

Taught at Wayne State, UC Iowa,
Harvard, Princeton, Brown, UC
Cincinnati, and UC Minnesota

Depressed, abused alcohol, committed
suicide by jumping off the Washington
Avenue Bridge
The Ball
What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,
Knowing what every man must one day know
What, what is he to do? I saw it go
And most know many days, how to stand up
Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then
And gradually light returns to the street
Merrily over--there it is in the water!
A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,
No use to say 'O there are other balls':
Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark
An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy
Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,
As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down
I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move
All his young days into the harbour where
With all that move me, under the water
His ball went. I would not intrude on him,
Or whistling, I am not a little boy.
A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now
He senses first responsibility
In a world of possessions. People will take balls,
Balls will be lost always, little boy,
And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.
He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,
The epistemology of loss, how to stand up
TPSFAST

Title – Has something to do with a ball, kid playing with a ball, or a professional athlete

Paraphrase- Different interpretations

Shifts- Changes subject throughout the poem

Figurative Language – Personification, repetition, imagery, rhetorical questions, symbolism

Attitude – Sad, depressing

Structure – Blank verse

Title/Theme

You have to learn how to let go sometimes

Life is full of challenges that you must learn to overcome

Take responsibility of your belongings

Never take anything for granted

Live life to the fullest, especially your childhood
Robert Lowell
March 1, 1917- September 12, 1977

From Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Notable works: Lord Weary's Castle, Life Studies, For the
Union Dead

Received his high school education at St. Mark's School

Converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism

Graduated from Kenyon in 1940 with a degree in
Classics, he worked on a Masters degree in English
literature at Louisiana State University for one year

Taught at the University of Cincinnati, Yale University,
Harvard University, and the New School for Social
Research

Served several months at the federal prison in Danbury,
Connecticut.

Suffered from manic depression and was hospitalized
many times throughout his adult life for this mental
illness.

Died in 1977, having suffered a heart attack in a cab in
New York City
Dolphin
My Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,
a captive as Racine, the man of craft,
drawn through his maze of iron composition
by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.
When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body
caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,
the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .
I have sat and listened to too many
words of the collaborating muse,
and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,
not avoiding injury to others,
not avoiding injury to myself--
to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,
an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting
my eyes have seen what my hand did.
TPSFAST
 Title: acknowledging the spontaneity of life
 Paraphrase: expresses the emotions of loneliness, helplessness, and the lack of
control in the writer's life
 Shifts: changes subject throughout poem
 Figurative Language: repetition, allusion, imagery, alliteration
 Attitude: Depressing
 Structure: free verse
 Themes:

Do not be so careless and wreckless

Be in control of your life

Learn from your mistakes

Organize your life to reach happiness
Anne Sexton
11/9/28 – 10/4/74

Anne Gray Harvey Sexton

Newtown, Mass

Boston University

Killed herself after both her parents
pasted.

a Pulitzer prize in 1967 for her poem
"Live or Die"

Wrote: live or die, courage, To Bedlam
and Part Way Back (1st poem), All My
Pretty Ones, Mercy Street

Abused her children, father alcoholic,
mother was never around.

Never interested in school till she got to
college.
Courage
It is in the small things we see it.
Later,
The child’s first step,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they call you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.
Later,
Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
then you did it alone,
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
picking the scabs off your heart,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
then wringing it out like a sock.
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
and at the last moment
you gave it a back rub
when death opens the back door
and then you covered it with a blanket
you’ll put on your carpet slipper
and after it had slept a while
and stride out.
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.
TPSFAST
 Title: has to deal with someone being courageous throughout life.
 Paraphrase: how life is at a young age then to a more mature life.
 Shifts: calm voice to a serious earthy tone.
 Figurative Language: metaphors, repetition, personification,
 Attitude: Depression and confession
 Structure: Free verse
 Themes:
 life is short enjoy while you have it.
 being strong in any type of situation.
 Survive through courage not fate.
Sylvia Plath
October 27, 1932- February 11, 1963

Born October 27, 1932 Boston, MA

Married British poet Ted Hughes, 2 children Frieda &
Nicholas

Started out her poems by keeping a journal

Wrote about suicidal thoughts, negative things

Spent time in MA to study with Robert Lowell and Anne
Sexton.

Smith College & Cambridge University England

Divorced, depression, commit suicide

Ariel, well-known poems, published after her death

The Bell Jar, The Colossus, The Collected Poems

Won Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for collected poems
Ariel
Stasis in darkness.
Black sweet blood mouthfuls,
Melts in the wall.
Then the substanceless blue
Shadows.
And I
Pour of tor and distances.
Something else
Am the arrow,
God's lioness,
Hauls me through air ----
How one we grow,
Thighs, hair;
Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow
Flakes from my heels.
Splits and passes, sister to
White
The brown arc
Godiva, I unpeel ----
Of the neck I cannot catch,
Dead hands, dead stringencies.
Nigger-eye
And now I
Berries cast dark
Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.
Hooks ----
The child's cry
The dew that flies,
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red
Eye, the cauldron of morning.
TPSFAST
 Title: Imagination of a girl committing suicide
 Paraphrase: Here she dies from falling off a horse, committing suicide.
 Shifts: Thoughtful  peaceful fearful
 Figurative Language: Metaphor (horse) & personification (herself & the
horse)
 Attitude: Mild and depression, sad.
 Structure: 10 three line stanzas with a single line at the end and follows a
slanted rhyme scheme.
 Title/Theme: Name of the horse. No matter what happens when you end
your life, you’ll always see something peaceful that you will end up going
to.
AP Style Writing Prompt 1
•
Read the following poem, Mirror by Sylvia Plath, carefully. Then write an essay
in which you discuss how use of language in the poem determines the reader’s
response to the speaker and his situation.
I am silver and exact. I have no
preconceptions.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or
the moon.
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful ‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite
wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so
long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and
over.
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation
of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the
darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in
me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible
fish.
AP Style Writing Prompt 2
•
Read carefully the following poem, Cinderella, by Anne Sexton. Then write a
well-organized essay in which you discuss how the poem’s controlling
metaphor expresses the complex attitude of the speaker.
You always read about it:
Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,
the plumber with the twelve children
eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,
who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.
the white truck like an ambulance
From toilets to riches.
who goes into real estate
That story.
and makes a pile.
From homogenized to martinis at lunch.
Or the nursemaid,
some luscious sweet from Denmark
Or the charwoman
who captures the oldest son's heart.
who is on the bus when it cracks up
from diapers to Dior.
and collects enough from the insurance.
That story.
From mops to Bonwit Teller.
That story.
Once
the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed
and she said to her daughter Cinderella:
Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile
down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.
The man took another wife who had
Next came the ball, as you all know.
It was a marriage market.
The prince was looking for a wife.
All but Cinderella were preparing
and gussying up for the event.
two daughters, pretty enough
Cinderella begged to go too.
but with hearts like blackjacks.
Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils
Cinderella was their maid.
into the cinders and said: Pick them
She slept on the sooty hearth each night
and walked around looking like Al Jolson.
Her father brought presents home from town,
jewels and gowns for the other women
but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.
up in an hour and you shall go.
The white dove brought all his friends;
all the warm wings of the fatherland came,
and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.
She planted that twig on her mother's grave
No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,
and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.
you have no clothes and cannot dance.
Whenever she wished for anything the dove
That's the way with stepmothers.
would drop it like an egg upon the ground.
The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.
Cinderella went to the tree at the grave
and cried forth like a gospel singer:
Mama! Mama! My turtledove,
send me to the prince's ball!
The bird dropped down a golden dress
and delicate little slippers.
Rather a large package for a simple bird.
So she went. Which is no surprise.
Her stepmother and sisters didn't
recognize her without her cinder face
and the prince took her hand on the spot
and danced with no other the whole day.
As nightfall came she thought she'd better
get home. The prince walked her home
and she disappeared into the pigeon house
and although the prince took an axe and broke
it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.
These events repeated themselves for three days.
However on the third day the prince
covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax
and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.
Now he would find whom the shoe fit
and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.
He went to their house and the two sisters
were delighted because they had lovely feet.
The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on
but her big toe got in the way so she simply
sliced it off and put on the slipper.
The prince rode away with her until the white dove
told him to look at the blood pouring forth.
That is the way with amputations.
They just don't heal up like a wish.
The other sister cut off her heel
but the blood told as blood will.
The prince was getting tired.
He began to feel like a shoe salesman.
But he gave it one last try.
This time Cinderella fit into the shoe
like a love letter into its envelope.
At the wedding ceremony
the two sisters came to curry favor
and the white dove pecked their eyes out.
Two hollow spots were left
like soup spoons.
Cinderella and the prince
lived, they say, happily ever after,
like two dolls in a museum case
never bothered by diapers or dust,
never arguing over the timing of an egg,
never telling the same story twice,
never getting a middle-aged spread,
their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
Regular Bobbsey Twins.
That story.
Lesson
Read the poem. Write/discuss the figurative language that is applied in the
poem.
Since Christmas they have lived with us,
The heart like wishes or free
Guileless and clear,
Peacocks blessing
Oval soul-animals,
Old ground with a feather
Taking up half the space,
Beaten in starry metals.
Moving and rubbing on the silk
Your small
Invisible air drifts,
Brother is making
Giving a shriek and pop
His balloon squeak like a cat.
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Seeming to see
Yellow cathead, blue fish---
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
Such queer moons we live with
He bites,
Instead of dead furniture!
Then sits
Straw mats, white walls
Back, fat jug
And these traveling
Contemplating a world clear as water.
Globes of thin air, red, green,
A red
Delighting
Shred in his little fist.

Quiz
1.
What year did the confessional poem era start?
a.
1850
b. 1915
c.
1930
d. 1950
2. Why did these poets commit suicide?
a.
Because they didn’t like who they were.
b. Because they hated everything that happened in their life.
c.
Because they were depressed.
d. None of the above.
3. Who grew up with uncaring parents?
a. Anne Sexton
b. Sylvia Plath
c.
Robert Lowell
d. John Berryman
4. Who tried to commit suicide by overdosing pills?
a. John Berryman
b. Robert Lowell
c.
Anne Sexton
d. Sylvia Plath
5. Other than this poet, his father also committed suicide.
a. John Berryman
b. Robert Lowell
c.
Anne Sexton
d. Sylvia Plath
Links
 “Sylvia Plath Biography.” Biography. Web. 16 Dec. 2012
 "John Berryman." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Apr. 2012. Web. 16
Dec. 2012.
 "John Berryman." - Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, 2012. Web. 16 Dec.
2012.
 “Anne Sexton’s Life.” Modern American Poetry. English Illinois. 2001 March 18.
16 Dec 2012.
 “AP English and Comp.” K12. Web. 2008. 12 Dec. 2012.
 “Ariel Poem.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia Foundation. 7 April 2010. Web. 16 Dec.
2012.
 “Robert Lowell.” UNCP. Web. 16 Dec. 2012.
 “Robert Lowell.” Modern American Poetry. English Illinois. 16 Dec. 2012.