September 15-21: Plath and Confessional Poetry

In “Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetery: A Reconsideration,” critic M. D. Uroff contends that Sylvia Plath uses “abstracted autobiographic” details to create feelings of sorrow and, adversely, side steps self-revelation. When considering confessional poetry, Robert Lowell’s Life Studies becomes the foreground of themes of sexuality, alcoholism, mental illness and despondence. Lowell uses his poetry to convey the speaker as a “literal self” that expresses personal, “confessional” details.
Although the term confessional poetry incorporates these ideas, of the literal self, Plath creates her own poetry that encompasses confessional themes. Unlike Lowell, Plath creates characters that are “generalized figures not real-life people, types that Plath manipulates dramatically in order to reveal their limitations.” Although Urloff states that these imaginative characters move past the boundaries of a typical confessional poet, Plath is still expressing all of the feelings and emotions congruent with the style. Plath’s characters are not truly literal, but are still images that convey the painful and suicidal emotions present in her life. Plath has stated, “I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous and emotional experiences I have, but I must say I cannot sympathize with these cries from the heart that are informed by nothing except a needle and a knife, or whatever it is. I believe that one should be able to control and manipulate experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being tortured, this sort of experience, and one should be able to manipulate these experiences with an informed and intelligent mind.” Here, Plath is stating that her poetry is a manipulated form of her deepest emotions. She is still confessing the themes of a confessional poet, but in a style different of Robert Lowell.
Throughout the article Uroff repeatedly mentions that Plath’s characters do not “confirm any self-understanding.” When discussing the poem “Daddy” Uroff states, “The pace of the poem reveals its speaker as one driven by a hysterical need for complete control, a need that stems from the fear that without such control she will be destroyed. Her simple, incantatory monologue is the perfect vehicle of expression for the orderly disordered mind.” The thought that there is no self-understanding in Plath’s poetry confirms the idea of the disordered mind. Plath must create these characters, and must have control on them because she herself does not understand the madness she feels and her lack of control she really has. Self-revelation is present in Plath’s poetry. She realizes her mental instability and creates characters to express her emotions. Uroff also states that Plath, “chose to deal with her experience by creating characters who could not deal with theirs and through their rituals demonstrate their failure.” Even though Plath chose to avoid the literal self in her poetry, she still successfully incorporates all of the emotions of a confessional poet.