A type of narrative and lyric verse, given by Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), which deals with the facts and
intimate mental and physical experiences of the poet's own life.
Confessional poetry was written in rebellion against the demand for impersonality by T. S. Eliot and the New Critics.
Differs in its secular subject matter from religious confessions in the lineage of Augustine's Confessions (c. 400 A.D.).
Differs also from poems of the Romantic Period representing the poet's own circumstances, experiences, and feelings, such as William Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode."
The poet reveals private or clinical matters about himself or herself, including sexual experiences, mental anguish and illness, experiments with drugs, and suicidal impulses.
Confessional poems were written by Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, and other American poets.
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