Published Paper Details:

The term "confessional poetry" was coined by M. L. Rosenthal, who was thinking specifically of a period in Robert Lowell's career when Lowell explored themes of sexual guilt, alcoholism, and psychiatric hospitalisation, developing them in the first person in a way that Rosenthal believed was meant to point to the poet. Though he was careful to define the genre narrowly, Rosenthal included Sylvia Plath in his list of confessional poets because, he claimed, she made the speaker's own frailty and humiliation an expression of her culture by placing herself at the poems' centre. Since then, Marjorie Perloff has argued that Plath's poetry lacks the realistic specificity of Lowell's work, and Ted Hughes has said that Plath employs autobiographical information in her poetry in a more iconic way than Lowell. If Hughes and Perloff are correct, as I believe they are, then we need to reevaluate the identity of the speaker, her relationship to the poet, and the degree to which the poems are confessional.