Policy and feminism in confessional poetry

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Àíèñèìîâà Ïîëèíà Ñåðãååâíà

Ñàíêò-Ïåòåðáóðã, 2019

Table of contents

Introduction

1. What is confessional poetry

1.1 Robert Lowell and his confessional poetry

1.2 The social status of confession by Michel Foucault

1.3 Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath: their confessional truth

2. Politics and feminism in female confessional poetry

2.1 Anne Sexton and her volume «Transformations»

2.2 Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin: their revisionist mythmaking

2.3 Maxine Kumin: moving from confession to elegy

Conclusion

Bibliography

Introduction

In this paper, the topic of confessional poetry is investigated, particularly the works of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin. The main aim of the present work is highlighting the differences between the confessional truths of each poet and identifying what role in the perception of the whole poem this truth plays. In order to reach that aim, several tasks were performed, and the first of them is defining confessional poetry, basing the definition on the existing research. Afterwards, poetry of Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin was analyzed, regarding the features of confessional poetry. Specific attention was paid to creating political and feministic effects by female confessional poetesses. Then, after analyzing poetry of abovementioned authors, the conclusions about confessional truth present in their works were drawn, and the connection between confessional truth and effect of the poems, for instance, truth in Sexton's poems and its feministic effects, was emphasized.

The present paper is dedicated to confessional poetry, the trend that emerged and was officially given a name in the second half of 20th century. In the present paper, I take a close look at works of confessional poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Maxine Kumin, who are considered to be among the most significant poets not only regarding this particular mode of writing, but also in the whole history of American poetry.

Confession has always been defined as something very private, and its meaning has always been closely linked to the notion of truth. In the present paper, I argue that there are specific different kinds of confessional truth which can be found in the poetry of Lowell, Plath, Sexton and Kumin.

In order to make an argument, I need to perform the following tasks. First of all, I need to investigate existing research on the topic of confessional poetry and list several features characteristic to it. Then, I will analyze poetry of the first confessional poet Robert Lowell, define why exactly is he considered to be confessional and try to define how is the truth presented in his poetry. I will also identify the process of producing his confessional truth. Afterwards, I will move on to analyzing Michel Foucault's “History of Sexuality” where he proclaims the status of confession ritual in society and lists its features; also the author considers the link between truth and confession. When this specific link is established, I will move on to closely reading Sylvia Plath's poetry and defining what the confessional truth means for her.

In the second chapter, I investigate how feminism and politics existing in poetry of confessional poets are presented. First of all, I will approach Anne Sexton's volume “Transformations”, which consists of rewritten narratives, and identify which tools she uses while rewriting. Then, I will pay attention to Alicia Ostriker's research about feminist language and revisionist mythmaking which is very important for analyzing “Transformations”. Finally, I will move on to analyzing Sylvia Plath's and Maxine Kumin's poetry and revisionist mythmaking present in it.

The aim of the work is to identify how the confessional truth of each mentioned poet in constructed and the ways it helps them to perform a certain effect in their poetry.

The objectives leading to reaching the aim of the present work are the following:

1. Define what is confessional poetry using M. Rosenthal's article and the example of Robert Lowell's poetry.

2. Identify the status of confession in accordance with Michel Foucault.

3. Specify the meaning of confessional truth in Robert Lowell's and Sylvia Plath's poetry.

4. Identify the methods used for making Anne Sexton's volume “Transformations” political and feministic.

5. Analyze Sylvia Plath's and Maxine Kumin's poetry in terms of revisionist mythmaking.

6. Specify the modes of Maxine Kumin's poetry.

7. Draw conclusions.

The mentioned poets are the most significant ones for the history of confessional poetry, therefore their poetry is a thoroughly analyzed by literary critics subject. Although they were studied in terms of the concept of confessional poetry, the subject of confessional truth was not brought up in various researches. Thus, the present work is relevant, because it is dedicated to defining confessional truth and the purposes of it in confessional poetry.

1. What is confessional poetry

1.1 Robert Lowell and his confessional poetry

To begin with Robert Lowell, it is important to say that he was an influential American poet of 20th century. When he was alive, he has been listed in the top most significant poets of the century among his famous contemporaries such as Elizabeth Bishop, Muriel Rukeyser, Karl Shapiro and others. He used to teach poetry at the University of Iowa and later at the University of Boston, where Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were his students, and then he taught at Yale, Harvard and other huge schools.

In order to define what confessional poetry is and list its features, I need to take a closer look at Robert Lowell's poetry. The history of the term “confessional poetry” starts from him and particularly his volume “Life Studies” that came out in 1959. It immediately attracted attention of literary critics including Macha Rosenthal, who wrote a review of mentioned volume called “Poetry as Confession”. In this article, the term “confessional poetry” was firstly introduced (Rosenthal 110). Rosenthal notices the newly appeared trend towards intimate poetry for the first time and tries to define it comparing poetry of various authors.

In his article, Rosenthal first talks about Emili Dickinson, American poetess, and her following words comparing the publication of poetry to “auction of the mind” (Rosenthal 109). There is always a possibility for the poet to be misunderstood, thus she called it an auction - the author is never confident who would get him right, if anyone would. According to Rosenthal, Robert Lowell regarded it more as soul's therapy. Lowell's poems contain direct and “the most naked” kind of confession (Rosenthal 109). In order to find the roots of confessional poetry, the author compares this new trend to traditions of various poetic movements in history; he starts with Romantic period and its representative, John Keats. According to the author of the article, Keats and other Romantics were more occupied with signs and symbols found outside of speaker's mind. Afterwards, Rosenthal moves to talking about Walt Whitman; he claims that his Calamus poems are very close to being called confessional but still not close enough. Among modernists and imagists, Rosenthal mentions T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, who bring up the forbidden topics in their poetry, but still the poet himself is fading in the poem, it is not possible to see him there.

Speaking about Robert Lowell, according to the author of the article, he was the first poet to remove the mask covering the actual poet's face in poetry, his speaker is definitely Robert Lowell himself. Now I will try to point out the significant features in the poems of mentioned authors in order to distinguish the markers of confessional poetry.

I will start with Keats' most famous poem “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. The speaker in that poem looks at the Grecian Urn and wonders about the story behind the painting: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loath? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?” (Keats). The urn embodies stillness, the painting caught only one quick moment of the whole story, which the speaker is trying to guess. “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss”, -- the speaker perceives the process of pursuit as eternal. Thus, while looking at the artwork with a picture of men chasing women, the speaker brings up the motif of desiring something but not having a possibility of obtaining it. He got that idea from the object from outside world, not connected to himself. Moreover, in the very end of the poem, the speaker draws a conclusion: “Beauty is truth, truth beauty, -- that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”.

Taking the analysis into consideration, I can claim that in the poem, the speaker is more occupied with the painting and the story behind it than with what feelings he has himself. Secondly, the speaker's last claim about beauty and truth is said in a certain way as if he believed this claim to be applicable for each one of his readers; he draws out a general truth for everybody, or at least he believes it to be a general truth.

Moving on to the next author, who is Walt Whitman, I want to comment on his cluster of poems called “Calamus” published in 1860. It was named after a Greek god Kalamus who let himself drown after seeing his male lover drowning. The cluster of poems is believed to be about homosexual love, there are several evidences to that statement in the texts: “I will write the evangel-poem of comrades and of love” (Whitman). In Calamus poems, the speaker is associated with Whitman, because he talks about his personal feelings and desires more than he talks about something outside of his mind: “From the pleasures, profits, conformities, which too long I was offering to feed my soul”. Whitman's speaker comes close to admitting that he is homosexual, but he never clearly does it - only gives hints: “I proceed for all who are of have been young men, to tell the secret of my nights and days, to celebrate the need of comrades”. Whitman uses the word “comrade” a lot, he talks about “the dear love of man for his comrade”, and that could have been interpreted in several ways. On the other hand, such sentences as “and his arm lay lightly around my breast - and that night I was happy” - although Whitman's speaker still calls this man “a comrade” and does not state directly what kind of a relationship they have.

Whitman's speaker, comparing to Keats', is much more concentrated on his own feelings than on the outside world, and in his poems, more controversial subjects are touched. However, Whitman's poetry cannot be called confessional, because it seems to readers as if he tries to pick the right words in order to express what he wants to say; he is very careful wording his feelings, and it is definitely not characteristic of confession.

A clear distinction can be seen after turning to Lowell's volume “Life Studies” and analyzing one of the poems from this volume, for example, “Man and Wife”. Its main topic is love, the same as in Whitman's poem, however, Lowell talks about it in a different way. He adds a lot of details concerning his speaker's private life - and those details are very definite, which makes the readers believe that the speaker is equal to Lowell himself. For instance, in the beginning of the poem, several details are used and all of them are alliterating: “Miltown”, “Mother's bed”, “Marlborough Street”, “magnolia” (Lowell 27). The alliteration draws readers' attention to this row of nouns, which seem as dragged out of Lowell's personal life. The usage of personal pronoun “you” by the speaker when he addresses his female lover also helps creating that effect; it also gives readers a certain feeling as if they were overhearing the lover's speech. He uses a pet name for her: “Oh my Petite”. The readers get a feeling that they overhear something very personal, something they should not have heard, something like a confession.

Coming back to Rosenthal's article, he claims that in his poems Lowell removes the mask usually hiding any poet, and that is why all the speakers in the poems in the volume “Life Studies” are associated with the author himself (Rosenthal 110). Removing the mask means that he does not try to choose the specific wording for his thoughts, he is not careful (like Whitman does in the mentioned volume), on the contrary, the poem looks like a speech of one lover dedicated to another lover. Lowell adds more and more details in order for the poem to be very personal. Rosenthal calls this style of writing poems confessional for the following reasons. In his perception, that poetic form reveals autobiographical material including evidence both of madness and intimacy. As Rosenthal puts it, confessional poetry is also marked by guilty feelings and is supposed to be shameful. As it was already mentioned before, he also calls confessional poetry “soul's therapy”.

In the last stanza of the previously mentioned poem “Man and Wife”, the changed life of two lovers is described. “Now twelve years later, you turn your back”, -- the couple's relationship has changed (Lowell 27). The wife is accusing her husband of something: “Your old-fashioned tirade - loving, rapid, merciless - breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head”. The husband feels guilty - he realizes that his wife has her own sorrows to talk about: “You hold your pillow to your hollows like a child”; but he does not listen to her speech, he does not hear what she says. Over time, the hands they held changed into the turned back. This tragic and rather shameful moment is described in the poem “Man and Wife” by Robert Lowell, and according to Rosenthal, that is what makes it confessional.

Rosenthal also states that the following about this poetic style: it was regarded as soul's therapy. According to him, Lowell coped with immoderate experiences by writing poems about them.

Thus, the features of confessional poetry introduced by M. Rosenthal and found in Robert Lowell's poetry are the following:

1. The subject of poems is the poet's own experience taken from his autobiography

2. The poet says everything directly and does not try to mask his ideas

3. The theme of poems is something shameful, something that normally is not talked about

4. Writing about certain experiences helps the author to overcome them, that is why that poetic style is called “soul's therapy”

1.2 The social status of confession by Michel Foucault

In order to define what exactly confessional poetry is, I need to regard one of the most influential works on the topic, which is “History of Sexuality” by Michel Foucault. Although he is not talking about poetry, a huge part of his book is dedicated to defining confession and its status as a social construct. In his book “The History of Sexuality”, Michel Foucault writes about the relationship of power and sexuality. He distinguishes two courses of managing sex. First, sexual desire was being regulated through both rules - for example, about children's masturbation - and restrictions of the boundaries - for example, observations in hospitals. Using these methods, the government tried to control and restrict sexual desire of each person. Second, the science of sex was divided into two separate branches: the biology of reproduction and the medicine of sex. Foucault claims that this separation of science into two courses and those mentioned restrictions prevented the possible progress in this field of being made, because while scientists were trying to develop scientific discourse about sex, other people experienced a lot of restrictions about sex which were put on by government. Thus, government wanted to develop the science and at the same time to control people's sexual desires. While science was encouraged by power, desires were discouraged by it, and that is the relationship between sexuality and power.

The author of the review of Foucault's work, Edith Kurzweil, notes that back at that time the interaction between several foreground scientists was happening, and in his book Foucault addresses some of them, particularly Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan (Kurzweil 423). Bartes was of opinion that western countries did not have eroticism any longer, and that claim is reflected upon in “History of Sexuality”, when Foucault argues that Western society has lost erotic art. He claimed that in Europe scientists worked on advancing their knowledge about sex, but at the same time people experienced restrictions to their desire, is was happening because of power control, as it was mentioned in previous paragraph. The following thing happened because of the exact same power control: society started practicing confession rituals, only not only in the special room in front of a priest, but at home. That is how, he claims, the sexual narrative appeared, scientific sexuality, and the move of confession ritual have been triggers to emergence of private letters, autobiographies, specific narratives. According to Foucault, from the 17th century and till 1970s people talked a lot about their desires, although with several restrictions regarding places where they could talk, other people with whom they could talk and so on. It is believed to be due to traditions of Catholic Church, in particular the necessity of confessing one's sins to a priest. Thus, the confession ritual emerged due to the power control performed by the church; it was believed that confession used to be a product of power. According to Foucault, thus sex was transformed into discourse, the same way as it used to take place in ascetic and monastic settings. “The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech” (Foucault 21). It was established by the government that society's present and future depended on not only the number of marriages of citizens, but also on the ways how the married couples formed their attitude to sex: “There also appeared those systematic campaigns which, going beyond the traditional means-moral and religious exhortations, fiscal measures-tried to transform the sexual conduct of couples into a concerted economic and political behavior” (Foucault 26).

In the third part of the book, he continues to reflect upon the new idea of confession, he states that the concept taken from catholic tradition started emerging into everyday life, for example, the connection between the confessor and the authoritarian figure started to be found in the relationship between the child and the parent, the student and the professor.

Foucault writes about confession being a method of producing truth. He argues that Western societies saw in that ritual the way of releasing the truth and he gives a couple of examples: “the declining importance of accusatory procedures in criminal justice, the abandonment of tests of guilt (sworn statements, duels, judgments of God) and the development of methods of interrogation and inquest” (Foucault 58). After all those mentioned rituals, our society has made confession of the most important techniques for producing truth; this ritual was applied in church, at home, education, medicine and so on. He also distinguishes two types of confession: the spontaneous and voluntary one, made according to the decision of the confessing person, and the forced one, evoked by violence: “When it is not spontaneous or dictated by some internal imperative, the confession is wrung from a person by violence or threat.” (Foucault 59) Foucault writes about the connection of torture and confession.

Foucault says that the necessity to confess has been integrated into our lives for such a long time that at some point people started forgetting that initially it was power that forced us to confess; thus, we began to perceive confession, on the contrary, as a ritual freeing from power. Thus, he claims that truth produced as a result of confession, is not made free by nature - its production was forced by power (Foucault 60).

Regarding the relationship of sex and confession, it is possible to claim that in accordance to power they had similar position: both were restrained by it.

The other kind of confession is confessional writing, which means writing private letters. According to Foucault and what he claims in one of his works, in confessional writings, everything is hyperbolized: “The experience of oneself was intensified and widened by virtue of this act of writing” (Foucault, “Technologies of the Self” 28). Confessional writing, as Foucault claims, has started with letters, afterwards moved to diaries: “This examination of conscience begins with this letter writing. Diary writing comes later. It dates from the Christian Era and focuses on the notion of the struggle of the soul.” (Foucault 30) Therefore the aim of confessional writers was to identify and realize guilt, according to the Christian religious tradition: “To acknowledge faults, to recognize temptations, to locate desires, and everyone is obliged to disclose these things either to God or to others…The truth obligations of faith and self are linked together. This link permits a purification of the soul impossible without self-knowledge” (Foucault 40).

Therefore I can claim the following: according to the author, a confession is a ritual of producing truth. In this ritual, two participants take part, the confessing and the listener. Another point mentioned by Foucault is the similarity of confession ritual and Christian tradition, and this similarity is in the necessity of disclosing private experience of one to people, which is equivalent to faith in God.

To sum up, here is the quote from Foucault about confession: “The confession is a ritual of discourse in which the speaking subject is also the subject of the statement; it is also a ritual that unfolds within a power relationship, for one does not confess without the presence (or virtual presence) of a partner who is not simply the interlocutor but the authority who requires the confession, prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile; a ritual in which the truth is corroborated by the obstacles and resistances it has had to surmount in order to be formulated; and finally, a ritual in which the expression alone, independently of its external consequences, produces intrinsic modifications in the person who articulates it: it exonerates, redeems, and purifies him; it unburdens him of his wrongs, liberates him, and promises him salvation” (Foucault, “The History of Sexuality” 61-62). Thus, he claims that the truth produced during the confession does not only depend on the ritual of confessing itself, but also on the reaction of the addressee. The first stage of producing truth is pronouncing it out loud, and the second one is assimilating it by another participant of the ritual: “It was the latter's function to verify this obscure truth: the revelation of confession had to be coupled with the decipherment of what it said” (Foucault 66). Moreover, no longer confession is an act of just saying something out loud: now it includes “thoughts that recapitulated it, the obsessions that accompanied it, the images, desires, modulations, and quality of the pleasure that animated it” (Foucault 63).

Taking everything into consideration, it is possible to claim the following things about confession. First of all, initially the confession was “the general standard governing the production of the true discourse on sex” (Foucault 63); so it has started with sex and the necessity put on by power to confess about sexual desires. However, later confession has spread over many spheres like education, medicine and others; it was used in different kinds of relationship like the ones between doctor and patient, child and parent, student and teacher. Secondly, as a result of confession the truth was produced: not only by pronouncing it by the confessing person, but also by deciphering what it means by the listening authority.

Thus, according to Michel Foucault and his book “History of Sexuality”, the confession implements the following features:

1. The emergence of ritual was forced by power structures

2. It is held within a power relationship and it is addressed to the authority, a real or virtual one

3. Through that ritual the truth is produced - both by confessing and listening sides

Basing the following conclusion on the previously analyzed pieces of existing research - “Poetry as Confession” by M. Rosenthal and “History of Sexuality” by M. Foucault, is it possible to state the following about confessional poetry. Firstly, confessional poems include author's own life experiences. Secondly, the author is ashamed of these experiences. Thirdly, the poem is addressed to some kind of an authority who has a right to judge the confessor. Fourthly, the author aims to gain a specific result after writing and publishing the poem - the truth, as Foucault claims, that is produced only when both said and heard, or the purging, as Rosenthal puts it.

Keeping in mind the definition of confessional poetry given by Rosenthal - especially the part about the autobiographical details serving as basis for poems, and comparing it to Foucault's thesis about confession producing truth, it is possible to raise the following question. What exactly is confessional truth? Does confessional truth, produced while confessing, differ from some true facts from the autobiography of the author? While analyzing confessional poetry of several authors, I will search for answers to those questions.

1.3 Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath: their confessional truth

In order to find answers to those questions, I need to take a closer look at poetry of two most prominent confessional poets - Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath.

Now I will proceed to analyzing existing research. One of the articles is called “On Robert Lowell” and it is written by Robert Boyers. In his article, the author reflects upon the qualities Lowell's readers valued in him as a poet and those features which could not be found in his poetry. The author of the article claims that the absence of clear instructions or strategies how to avoid “intimations of disaster” or “metaphysical dread” in Lowell's poetry has turned away a lot of potential readers (Boyers 37). These are the features which his poems lack. Instead, his writings are marked by “the odd combination of hesitation, commitment, regret, disgust, reminiscence and weariness” (Boyers 38). Therefore the author calls him not a hero and not an anti-hero, but a “victim, one who has not learned to cope to the degree that he has refused to compromise the clarity of his perceptions. His tragedy, if you will, is not that seeing clearly, he must lose his eyes, or wander friendless, but that he continues to see, to grow bored, and to be” (Boyers 38). The author calls Lowell “out poet”, because it was not easy for Lowell to get through each week, and he honestly shared his feelings with his readers (Boyers 38). Although according to the author, the readers do not suffer with Lowell, instead they envy his capacity of suffering; they decide that it is enough that Lowell already suffers himself.

Boyers calls this relationship between the poet and his audience extraordinary, and argues that in order to reach this kind of relationship, Lowell needed to reconstruct his personality so that it fits in. A posture, as the author claims, is changeable in accordance to surrounding circumstances; in those circumstances back in the times, Lowell has become the “truest victim”, his failures were deplored and pitied by his readers, and therefore he was repeatedly thanked by his audience, especially by those who “have found even the lesser failures a bit more costly than we are willing to allow ourselves”. Instead of being a man, he became a posture.

Now I will proceed to analyzing another article on Lowell, “Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration” by M.D. Uroff. In general, Uroff writes about Sylvia Plath; he also compares Lowell's confessionalism to the one of Plath. First of all, the author of the article states that taking a look at Lowell's poems and his biography, he can claim that the poet uses made-up facts in his poems and presents them as the real ones, so that the readers truly believe that speaker and poet are the exact same person and have been through the same experience. Lowell has said it himself - in Frederick Seidel's “An Interview with Robert Lowell” published in 1970, he claimed that he made up several facts about his biography, however, he wanted his readers to believe that those facts are truly biographical (Seidel 247). On the other hand, another thing about Robert Lowell's poetry pointed out by Uroff is that some characters belonging to Lowell's poems appear throughout his poetry several times: for instance, Mrs. Lowell and the Commander. These characters seem to be patterned off real people existing in Lowell's life.

Next thing claimed by the author is the following: “The literal self in Lowell's poetry is to be sure a literary self, but fairly consistently developed as a self-deprecating, modest, comic figure” (Uroff 105). Thus, the way Lowell talks about humiliating experiences and the fact that he wants his readers to believe them to having truly happened in his life, make his poems similar to confessions. Then the author of the article proceeds to analyzing Lowell's style of writing that is very self-accusatory. “Although we as readers have no power to forgive,” - claims the author of the article, - “Lowell's self-accusatory manner makes it impossible to judge” (Uroff 105).

Basing my next claim on that, I can say that one of confession features pointed out by Michel Foucault is fulfilled in Lowell's poetry; although the judging figure is not present in his poems, the speaker acts as if the judge was nearby and accuses himself.

Coming back to the first mentioned article, the author says that what Lowell's poems actually lack, is dénouement. He does not provide his readers with some kind of an exact conclusion, does not summarize anything. His speaker explores his experience, goes deep inside it and contemplates his feelings which often are shame, sorrow and regret.

In order to give proofs to all the mentioned features of Robert Lowell's poetry, I need to analyze his poems. In the article, the poem “Skunk Hour” is mentioned, so I will take a closer look at it. The poem was written in 1957; it was the last poem included in the volume “Life Studies”. It consists of 8 stanzas: the first 4 of them are dedicated to creating an image of the action place, Nautilus Island, and its habitants like old hermit heiress, her son who is a bishop, a decorator who does not earn enough money. They all lead unhappy lives, that part of the poem seems rather pessimistic. Those several stanzas are written with the usage of the pronoun “we”; it serves for presenting the experience talked about in the poem as a collective one: “we've lost our summer millionaire”, “our fairy decorator brightens his shop for fall [] there is no money in his work” (Lowell 39). Therefore, these rather sorrowful experiences of other people are presented to readers as personal because of the usage of first-person plural pronoun.

Then the focus of the poem switches to the speaker who drives to the hill, and immediately tells the readers a shameful fact about him: “I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down, they lay together, hull to hull”. He confesses that and straightaway admits that he himself considers it abnormal: “My mind is not right”. The readers can understand that the mental state of the speaker is not healthy enough because of the following several characteristics: “my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell”, “I myself am hell”. The speaker feels disgust for himself and for what he is doing. He also is feeling alone; the distinction between first four stanzas and last four stanzas is clearly seen, especially because of the switch from first-plural pronoun to first-singular pronoun. Therefore, the speaker clearly distances himself from other people and experiences unpleasant feelings to them, to himself and to life in general.

The author provides readers with several details from reality - for example, the name of the car the speaker is driving: “Tudor Ford”, the song “Love, O careless Love” played on the radio. These provided details help to create a feeling of that story having taken place in real life of the author, they help readers to picture the story more vivid.

In the last but one stanza, the action place changes; the speaker is no more at the hill, now he watches skunks marching along Main Street. Something changes in his perception: he does not feel disgust anymore, on the contrary, he “stands on top of our back steps and breathes rich air”. A positive change in his attitude occurs while watching marching skunks, who search for food in the garbage.

This poem is confessional for the following reasons. First of all, the speaker discloses a certain shameful event, in particular watching lovers in cars. As in is common in Lowell's poetry, the speaker immediately judges himself: “My mind is not right”, “I myself am hell”. Secondly, the poem is full of little details which give a certain impression of that poem being written after some autobiographical facts, for example, the name of the song played on the car radio: “Love, O careless Love…” or the name of the street where the skinks march: “Main Street”.

Coming back to the articles by Boyers and Uroff and their theories, it is clear in that poem that Lowell victimizes his speaker, he presents a shameful experience of his in a certain self-accusatory manner that makes it impossible for the readers to judge the speaker and lets them only feel sorry for him and sympathize with him. In order to do that, to victimize his speaker, Lowell makes up a shameful experience and by using realistic details like names of songs and streets, he makes his readers believe that this story is autobiographical. Thus, while thinking that the regretting speaker who feels sorrow is Robert Lowell, the readers sympathize with him more. confessional poetry feminism revisionist

Considering the book and the article by M. Foucault and Rosenthal and regarding the previously stated question about confessional truth, it is possible to claim the following. As a basis for his poems, Lowell uses made-up facts, he deviates the truth from his real life; however, he presents them in a specific way that, firstly, makes his readers believe them to be true, secondly, these facts help to create an image of the speaker as a victim, and that was one of the aims of Lowell's poetry. Coming back to Foucault's claim about truth being produced while not only confessing, but also deciphering the confession, I can claim that it is exactly what happens after reading Lowell's poetry by readers - they believe it to be true, thus, the confessional truth is produced. Both sides participate in creating confessional truth: Lowell while deviating the truth from his real life and striving to create believable facts, readers while believing and thus sympathizing him.

Thus, basing this conclusion on two reviewed articles, it is possible to state the following things about Lowell's poetry. First of all, in his poems, Lowell used made-up facts about him. He manipulated the truth in order to create an image of a suffering man that became his postage, so that his audience perceive him as a victim.

Taking that into consideration, I can say that Lowell's device was manipulating the truth about himself. He used to make up some facts about his biography - although he presented them as if they were completely true. Thus, he created a posture for himself and coined an image presenting him as a suffering and wandering victim; this strategy caused a great sympathy among his audience who thus were given a person to feel pity for, to whine about.

Considering everything mentioned, I can make the following conclusion about Lowell's confessional poetry. First of all, Foucault's idea about confession as a process held between two participants, confessing and judging, can be applied to his poetry, because his speakers accuse themselves, and the readers have a right to judge, they feel pity for him. Secondly, he writes about failures, about unpleasant experiences, shameful occasions - although a part of them is made up, Lowell invented several plots for his poems and wanted his readers to believe that those situations actually occurred in poet's life. Thus, one of the most important components in confession, the truth, is often not present in Lowell's poetry.

The technique the poet uses is victimizing himself in order for his audience to pity him. In order to reach it, he comes up with plots for his poems which seem very real for those who read him. In conclusion, Robert Lowell's dominant device is integrating unreal events into his poems and making them seem real to his readers. That is how he reaches the effect of making the audience feel sorry for him and implements one of Foucault's ideas about confession.

Now I will move forward to analyzing existing research about Sylvia Plath and then her poems and trying to define what relationship with truth they have. Speaking of Sylvia Plath, it is necessary to say that she was a student of Lowell at Boston University. It is commonly believed that she was inspired quite a lot by Lowell's works - Plath has said it herself in several interviews. Now I move to the article by Sarah-Jane Burton called “An Introduction to `the Boston Trio: Sylvia Plath with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton'”. The author of the article calls these poets “the trio”, because regarding so many issues like confessional poetry or Boston University or teaching poetry their names come up together (Burton 75). In this article, the story of Plath getting to know Lowell is told, and her feelings - which are easy to describe using the word “admiration” - about how she first read his works and the next day met him are disclosed. Not only Lowell has had a great influence on Plath, but also Virginia Woolf, W.H. Auden, D.H. Lawrence and many others; although she has spent a lot of time working with Lowell and Sexton - in his workshop about writing poetry held at Boston University, which was conveyed very unusually: “He alternately scolded, prodded, encouraged, ignored, protected, and pitted his students against each other to spur their own development”, says Burton (79). It is also stated in the article that the feelings she had while reading Lowell for the first time were similar to those she experienced when she read the poems of Ted Hughes, her husband. The first time she heard him reading, Lowell performed “Skunk Hour” that was analyzed previously in this paper. “Undoubtedly Lowell's lines, "My mind's not right" and, "I myself am hell, nobody's here" would have deeply resonated with Plath's own experiences of mental anguish, causing an intimate literary connection to emerge as Lowell's smoky voice transmitted the lines to his audience”, -- that is what Burton says about this encounter (77).

In order to prove this statement, I need to take a closer look at some of her poems written after 1959, the year they met. One of Plath's poems mentioned in the article is “Blue Moles” written in the same year she met Lowell. Burton briefly mentions that Plath's moles “delving for the appendages” and Lowell's skunks correlate with each other. I can also add to it that Plath's poem is divided into two parts; in the first one there is no speaker at all - first two stanzas contain only the plain description of moles. In the second part - two last stanzas, the speaker emerges who is referred to with the first-person singular pronoun. The same way in Lowell's “Skunk Hour” the first-person singular pronoun also appears in the second part of the poem. In both poems, this method serves for distancing the speaker from the described setting. That is one example of the influence Lowell had on Plath.

I will move on to reviewing one of the most important articles about Plath and Lowell and afterwards to analyzing Plath's poetry. The author of the next article called “Sylvia Plath and Confessional Poetry: A Reconsideration” takes into consideration the initial definition of confessional poetry given by M.L. Rosenthal. M.D. Uroff performs an attempt of reconsideration of the speaker's nature in Plath's poetry, he also evaluates the extent of confessionalism which her poems have.

Uroff first starts with several claims about Robert Lowell and his poetry. As it was already mentioned by me in the previous section dedicated to Lowell, regarding his poetry and comparing it to his biography, it is possible to say that in his poems Lowell invented some facts about his autobiography; although his main aim was to make his readers believe these facts to be true and not to differentiate experiences of the speaker and of the author. The second mentioned thing is that although he invents his biography, some of his characters seem like people from his real-life and they appear several times throughout his writings.

When comparing these features of Robert Lowell's poetry to Sylvia Plath's, the author concludes that there are several significant distinctions. First, characters of Plath do not seem to be similar to real people; moreover, they are exaggerated and generalized, and that is how she manipulates her real experience in order to write poetry. For example, according to Uroff's theory, it is a fact that Plath had complicated feelings to her father, and that has affected her personality quite a lot. In her poems covering that topic of tough relations with fathers, her own father is depicted not as a real human who he was, but as a collective character, almost a monster. In a poem “Daddy”, Plath makes him into fascist - she hyperbolizes her own experience in her writings about it.

On the other hand, as it was already said, Lowell's speaker in order to learn the truth about his experience searches through his pain, as the same time blaming himself for committing it. Although such search is not performed by Plath's speaker; she does not go deep into her experience in her poems, she does the opposite thing - exaggerates it and contemplates it from aside.

To provide evidence for his readers, the author of the article sites two poems: Lowell's “Skunk Hour” and Plath's “Miss Drake Proceeds to Supper”. In the first one, as it was already mentioned previously, the speaker admits himself that there is something wrong with him - “My mind is not right”. In the latter one, the character is mad, but she does not realize it and performs specific rituals in order for madness to remain. The character is in the ward: “The new woman in the ward wears purple, steps carefully” (Plath 41). There is something wrong with her mental state, but she does not realize it and keeps performing certain rituals: “Among her secret combinations of eggshells and breakable hummingbirds”. Thus, the thing that mostly concerns the author of the poem is not her experience's nature, but the paths of coping with it and continuing living: “She lifts one webbed foot after the other into the still, sultry weather of the patients' dining room”. The character does not try to evaluate her mental state - instead she keeps living in the ward and doing things she is used to doing.

Typical strategies of her characters are hyperbolizing, exaggerating and intensifying experiences from real life. Coming back to Lowell's speakers, their main strategies for dealing with experiences are accepting their downfalls, talking about them out loud, accusing themselves. The mentioned differences are drawn from comparing the manner of writing of the two authors; and the foreground distinction is that Lowell comes up with some made-up facts about his biography in order to employ them in his poems, so that the reader thinks that speaker is equivalent to the author. On the other hand, Plath actually equals her speakers, who deal with the same experiences she has dealt with, only in an exaggerated form.

To prove that, I need to analyze her most well-known poem “Daddy”. Plath's father, Otto Plath, was born in Germany in 1885. Later in 1990, he moved to United States, where he found a job and remained. He did not participate in the 2nd World War - however, in her poem “Daddy”, Plath exaggerates his image and writes about her father as if he was a Nazi. She creates an image of her father both symbolically and linguistically: due to his German origin, his first language was German; thus, Plath puts several German words in the poem: “Ach, du”, “Panzer-man”, “Meinkampf” - even thou she did not speak the language herself (Plath 122). Thus, to create a feeling of her father's presence in the poem, she used some words in a language he spoke.

Speaking about the symbolic part of imagery, she makes the same juxtaposition of herself and her father as there is between Jews and Nazis: “An engine chuffing me off like a Jew. A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen”. Due to that juxtaposition, although her speaker she is not a Jew herself, she begins to feel like one: “I began to talk like a Jew. I think I may well be a Jew”. Since she is not a Jew, but she feels like one when thinking about her father, this metaphor simply means that she is scared of him and he has hurt her.

Plath had complicated feelings towards her father. He became sick in 1935, but was inaccurately diagnosed; later in 1940 turned out he had diabetes, and due to this disease he lost his leg. In 1940, when Sylvia Plath was 8 years old, he died. That has affected Plath a lot and left her with emotional trauma, due to which she performed several attempts of committing suicide.

Thus, having established that she had traumatic memories about her father, it is possible to say, that this poem is based on her autobiography, and the speaker is equal to Plath herself. Speaking of the symbolic part of imagery, there is an opposition of Jews and Nazis, found in the poem, is equal to the opposition of herself and her father - only in an exaggerated form. The other exaggerated in the poem thing concerns her father's operation: his leg was amputated a few years before his death. That is a reason for several references in the poem: “Black shoe in which I have lived like a foot”, “ghastly statue with one gray toe big as a Frisco seal”. In a poem, she hyperbolizes an image of her father with his gangrenous leg into a gigantic statue with one huge toe.

Another exaggerated image connected to Plath's father appears later in the poem. In the last two stanzas, the image of her father from Nazi changes into vampire: “The vampire who said he was you and drank my blood for a year”. He dies from a stake: “There's a stake in your fat black heart and the villagers never liked you”. There is a specific reason for choosing this image of a vampire: Otto Plath used to teach German and biology at the universities, and once he conveyed a study of parasites which was turned into the book “Muscid Larvae of the San Francisco Bay Region Which Sucks Blood of Nesting Birds” about these larvae. Thus, Plath takes this fact that her father wrote a book about insects sucking blood as a basis for a hyperbole, and exaggerates it into a picture of her father being a vampire.

Basing this conclusion on the information from the previous paragraphs, it is possible to claim the following about Sylvia Plath's poetic features. Firstly, she writes about her real experiences - for example, about her complicated relationship with her father in the analyzed poem “Daddy”. Secondly, although she states the truth in her poems, she manipulates it, deviates it - in a different way than Lowell does it -- and exaggerates the real experience she has been through; thus, she makes her speakers deal with those intensified images - like father-fascist image. Thus, Sylvia Plath's dominant poetic device is taking an image from reality, and deviating it through exaggeration in a poem.

Considering everything, it is possible to claim that Lowell and Plath both deviate the truth from reality for creating poems, however, they perform it differently. Firstly, Lowell deviates it before starting writing a poem, his deviation of truth is not a poetic device, but a basis of his poems; on the other hand, Plath deviates it in the very poem, hyperbolizing is her dominant poetic device she uses in creating poetry, and as a basis she uses facts and stories from real life. Secondly, Lowell's deviations of truth remain secret for public - if they would not remain so, then his poetry would not reach its aim of making readers feel sorry for the victimized speaker. Plath's hyperboles are very clear to public: while reading, the readers realize that it is a device she uses.

The next analyzed poem of Plath is called “Lady Lazarus”. This poem has been analyzed quite a lot by literary critics since it came out in 1962, shortly before Plath's suicide in 1963. Speaking of biographical details characteristic to confessional poetry, the poem is full of them. For example, at the age of 10 Sylvia Plath almost drowned while swimming - by some is was believed to be a suicide attempt. The poem is entirely about death and suicide - and the first lines “I have done it again. One year in every ten”, “the first time it happened I was ten” - relate to that first attempt performed by her at the age of 10 (Plath 244). Although in that poem her German father, Otto Plath, is not directly mentioned, some German-related words refer to him: “Nazi lampshade”, “Herr Doktor”, “Jew linen”, “Herr Enemy”. They also remind the readers about the poem “Daddy” that was previously analyzed in the paper and establish a connection between these two poems.