The Coming on of Night

Confessional poetry has a long and storied history. Some would draw it back to Saint Augustine, who was one of the first to write about his personal struggles as important enough to be worth contemplating. It became even more popular during the Romantic Period, when writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote “The Confessions,” and with the rise of democracy. Walt Whitman, one of the first American poets, differentiated himself and set a tone for what would become American poetry by writing about “ordinary” people, as opposed to writing about royalty, politicians, and heroic figures of antiquity. The heyday of Confessional poetry though was the 1950s and 1960s, when critic M. L. Rosenthal coined the term in his review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in the Nation. In addition to writing about his ordinary life, Lowell wrote poems about his topics intimately, i.e., as though he were “confessing” some personal information to a friend.

That era of poetry sprang up as a response to the perceived stuffiness and excessive formalism of the academic poetry of the 1940s and 1950s. Confessional poets tend to write more freely about personal matters that are often deemed taboo, including mental illness, sexual abuse, drug use, or any topic a person may otherwise feel they would need to hide from polite society.