Confessional Movement

Pamela Alalay

Hazelle Fabian

Erik Alagar

Kelvin Ritualo

Definition Autobiographical subject matter that is sometimes referred

to as grotesque.

Personal pronouns; I, me, my

Love affairs, suicidal thoughts, fears of failure, downright violent opinions about family members, other autobiography sensitive material.

Reveals the poet’s personal problems and unusual frankness.

Associated with work from movement of 1950’s and 1960s.

Poetic Techniques & Themes John Berryman Themes-

You have to learn how to let go sometimes.

Life is full of challenges.

Take responsibility of everything you own because they all have their own value.

Never take your life or anything for granted.

Live life to the fullest (enjoy your childhood before it's too late).

Poetic Techniques- Personification

Comparison

Blank Verse

Repetition

Imagery

Rhetorical Question

Symbolism

Robert Lowell Themes-

Views and opinions of life and his life

Struggles life encounters

Helplessness

Bold

Religion: Catholic Symbolism

Poetic Techniques-

Allusion

Alliteration

Imagery

Figurative language

Repitition

Poetic Techniques & Themes Anne Sexton

Themes- Religious quest

Gender

Mother/daughter relationship

Madness of suicidal thoughts

Issues of female identity

Poetic Techniques- Repetition

Similes

Metonymy

Sylvia Plath Themes-

Life vs. World

Imagination

Depression

Childhood memories

Negative thoughts

Poetic Techniques- Sound effects

Rhyme & Rhythm

Tone

John BerrymanOctober 24, 1914 – January 7, 1972

John Allyn Smith Jr.

McAlester, Oklahoma

Father committed suicide

Columbia College

Began an affair in 1947, married 3 times

Included in “Five Young American Poets”

Wrote The Poems, The Dispossessed, a biography, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet,The Dream Songs, His Toy, His Dream, His Rest

Taught at Wayne State, UC Iowa, Harvard, Princeton, Brown, UC Cincinnati, and UC Minnesota

Depressed, abused alcohol, committed suicide by jumping off the Washington Avenue Bridge

The Ball

What is the boy now, who has lost his ball,

What, what is he to do? I saw it go

Merrily bouncing, down the street, and then

Merrily over--there it is in the water!

No use to say 'O there are other balls':

An ultimate shaking grief fixes the boy

As he stands rigid, trembling, staring down

All his young days into the harbour where

His ball went. I would not intrude on him,

A dime, another ball, is worthless. Now

He senses first responsibility

In a world of possessions. People will take balls,

Balls will be lost always, little boy,

And no one buys a ball back. Money is external.

He is learning, well behind his desperate eyes,

The epistemology of loss, how to stand up

Knowing what every man must one day know

And most know many days, how to stand up

And gradually light returns to the street

A whistle blows, the ball is out of sight,

Soon part of me will explore the deep and dark

Floor of the harbour . . I am everywhere,

I suffer and move, my mind and my heart move

With all that move me, under the water

Or whistling, I am not a little boy.

TPSFAST

Title – Has something to do with a ball, kid playing with a ball, or a professional athlete

Paraphrase- Different interpretations

Shifts- Changes subject throughout the poem

Figurative Language – Personification, repetition, imagery, rhetorical questions, symbolism

Attitude – Sad, depressing

Structure – Blank verse

Title/Theme You have to learn how to let go sometimes

Life is full of challenges that you must learn to overcome

Take responsibility of your belongings

Never take anything for granted

Live life to the fullest, especially your childhood

Robert LowellMarch 1, 1917- September 12, 1977

From Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Notable works: Lord Weary's Castle, Life Studies, For the Union Dead

Received his high school education at St. Mark's School

Converted from Episcopalianism to Catholicism

Graduated from Kenyon in 1940 with a degree in Classics, he worked on a Masters degree in English literature at Louisiana State University for one year

Taught at the University of Cincinnati, Yale University, Harvard University, and the New School for Social Research

Served several months at the federal prison in Danbury, Connecticut.

Suffered from manic depression and was hospitalized many times throughout his adult life for this mental illness.

Died in 1977, having suffered a heart attack in a cab in New York City

DolphinMy Dolphin, you only guide me by surprise,

a captive as Racine, the man of craft,

drawn through his maze of iron composition

by the incomparable wandering voice of Phèdre.

When I was troubled in mind, you made for my body

caught in its hangman's-knot of sinking lines,

the glassy bowing and scraping of my will. . . .

I have sat and listened to too many

words of the collaborating muse,

and plotted perhaps too freely with my life,

not avoiding injury to others,

not avoiding injury to myself--

to ask compassion . . . this book, half fiction,

an eelnet made by man for the eel fighting

my eyes have seen what my hand did.

TPSFAST Title: acknowledging the spontaneity of life

Paraphrase: expresses the emotions of loneliness, helplessness, and the lack of control in the writer's life

Shifts: changes subject throughout poem

Figurative Language: repetition, allusion, imagery, alliteration

Attitude: Depressing

Structure: free verse

Themes: Do not be so careless and wreckless

Be in control of your life

Learn from your mistakes

Organize your life to reach happiness

Anne Sexton 11/9/28 – 10/4/74

Anne Gray Harvey Sexton

Newtown, Mass

Boston University

Killed herself after both her parents pasted.

a Pulitzer prize in 1967 for her poem "Live or Die"

Wrote: live or die, courage, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1st poem), All My Pretty Ones, Mercy Street

Abused her children, father alcoholic, mother was never around.

Never interested in school till she got to college.

CourageIt is in the small things we see it.

The child’s first step,

as awesome as an earthquake.

The first time you rode a bike,

wallowing up the sidewalk.

The first spanking when your heart

went on a journey all alone.

When they call you crybaby

or poor or fatty or crazy

and made you into an alien,

you drank their acid

and concealed it.

Later,

if you faced the death of bombs and bullets

you did not do it with a banner,

you did it with only a hat to

cover your heart.

You did not fondle the weakness inside you

though it was there.

Your courage was a small coal

that you kept swallowing.

If your buddy saved you

and died himself in so doing,

then his courage was not courage,

it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,

if you have endured a great despair,

then you did it alone,

getting a transfusion from the fire,

picking the scabs off your heart,

then wringing it out like a sock.

Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,

you gave it a back rub

and then you covered it with a blanket

and after it had slept a while

it woke to the wings of the roses

and was transformed.

Later,

when you face old age and its natural conclusion

your courage will still be shown in the little ways,

each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,

those you love will live in a fever of love,

and you’ll bargain with the calendar

and at the last moment

when death opens the back door

you’ll put on your carpet slipper

and stride out.

TPSFAST Title: has to deal with someone being courageous throughout life.

Paraphrase: how life is at a young age then to a more mature life.

Shifts: calm voice to a serious earthy tone.

Figurative Language: metaphors, repetition, personification,

Attitude: Depression and confession

Structure: Free verse

Themes: life is short enjoy while you have it.

being strong in any type of situation.

Survive through courage not fate.

Sylvia PlathOctober 27, 1932- February 11, 1963

Born October 27, 1932 Boston, MA

Married British poet Ted Hughes, 2 children Frieda & Nicholas

Started out her poems by keeping a journal

Wrote about suicidal thoughts, negative things

Spent time in MA to study with Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton.

Smith College & Cambridge University England

Divorced, depression, commit suicide

Ariel, well-known poems, published after her death

The Bell Jar, The Colossus, The Collected Poems

Won Pulitzer Prize in 1982 for collected poems

Ariel

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue

Pour of tor and distances.

God's lioness,

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees! -- The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye

Berries cast dark

Hooks ----

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air ----

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel ----

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.

The child's cry

Melts in the wall.

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies,

Suicidal, at one with the drive

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

TPSFAST

Title: Imagination of a girl committing suicide

Paraphrase: Here she dies from falling off a horse, committing suicide.

Shifts: Thoughtful peaceful fearful

Figurative Language: Metaphor (horse) & personification (herself & the horse)

Attitude: Mild and depression, sad.

Structure: 10 three line stanzas with a single line at the end and follows a slanted rhyme scheme.

Title/Theme: Name of the horse. No matter what happens when you end your life, you’ll always see something peaceful that you will end up going to.

AP Style Writing Prompt 1

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.

Whatever I see I swallow immediately

Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.

I am not cruel, only truthful ‚

The eye of a little god, four-cornered.

Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.

It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long

I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.

Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,

Searching my reaches for what she really is.

Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.

I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.

She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.

I am important to her. She comes and goes.

Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.

In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman

Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

• Read the following poem, Mirror by Sylvia Plath, carefully. Then write an essay in which you discuss how use of language in the poem determines the reader’s response to the speaker and his situation.

AP Style Writing Prompt 2

You always read about it:

the plumber with the twelve children

who wins the Irish Sweepstakes.

From toilets to riches.

That story.

Or the nursemaid,

some luscious sweet from Denmark

who captures the oldest son's heart.

from diapers to Dior.

That story.

Or a milkman who serves the wealthy,

eggs, cream, butter, yogurt, milk,

the white truck like an ambulance

who goes into real estate

and makes a pile.

From homogenized to martinis at lunch.

Or the charwoman

who is on the bus when it cracks up

and collects enough from the insurance.

From mops to Bonwit Teller.

That story.

• Read carefully the following poem, Cinderella, by Anne Sexton. Then write a well-organized essay in which you discuss how the poem’s controlling metaphor expresses the complex attitude of the speaker.

Once

the wife of a rich man was on her deathbed

and she said to her daughter Cinderella:

Be devout. Be good. Then I will smile

down from heaven in the seam of a cloud.

The man took another wife who had

two daughters, pretty enough

but with hearts like blackjacks.

Cinderella was their maid.

She slept on the sooty hearth each night

and walked around looking like Al Jolson.

Her father brought presents home from town,

jewels and gowns for the other women

but the twig of a tree for Cinderella.

She planted that twig on her mother's grave

and it grew to a tree where a white dove sat.

Whenever she wished for anything the dove

would drop it like an egg upon the ground.

The bird is important, my dears, so heed him.

Next came the ball, as you all know.

It was a marriage market.

The prince was looking for a wife.

All but Cinderella were preparing

and gussying up for the event.

Cinderella begged to go too.

Her stepmother threw a dish of lentils

into the cinders and said: Pick them

up in an hour and you shall go.

The white dove brought all his friends;

all the warm wings of the fatherland came,

and picked up the lentils in a jiffy.

No, Cinderella, said the stepmother,

you have no clothes and cannot dance.

That's the way with stepmothers.

Cinderella went to the tree at the grave

and cried forth like a gospel singer:

Mama! Mama! My turtledove,

send me to the prince's ball!

The bird dropped down a golden dress

and delicate little slippers.

Rather a large package for a simple bird.

So she went. Which is no surprise.

Her stepmother and sisters didn't

recognize her without her cinder face

and the prince took her hand on the spot

and danced with no other the whole day.

As nightfall came she thought she'd better

get home. The prince walked her home

and she disappeared into the pigeon house

and although the prince took an axe and broke

it open she was gone. Back to her cinders.

These events repeated themselves for three days.

However on the third day the prince

covered the palace steps with cobbler's wax

and Cinderella's gold shoe stuck upon it.

Now he would find whom the shoe fit

and find his strange dancing girl for keeps.

He went to their house and the two sisters

were delighted because they had lovely feet.

The eldest went into a room to try the slipper on

but her big toe got in the way so she simply

sliced it off and put on the slipper.

The prince rode away with her until the white dove

told him to look at the blood pouring forth.

That is the way with amputations.

They just don't heal up like a wish.

The other sister cut off her heel

but the blood told as blood will.

The prince was getting tired.

He began to feel like a shoe salesman.

But he gave it one last try.

This time Cinderella fit into the shoe

like a love letter into its envelope.

At the wedding ceremony

the two sisters came to curry favor

and the white dove pecked their eyes out.

Two hollow spots were left

like soup spoons.

Cinderella and the prince

lived, they say, happily ever after,

like two dolls in a museum case

never bothered by diapers or dust,

never arguing over the timing of an egg,

never telling the same story twice,

never getting a middle-aged spread,

their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.

Regular Bobbsey Twins.

That story.

Lesson

Since Christmas they have lived with us,

Guileless and clear,

Oval soul-animals,

Taking up half the space,

Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,

Giving a shriek and pop

When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.

Yellow cathead, blue fish---

Such queer moons we live with

Instead of dead furniture!

Straw mats, white walls

And these traveling

Globes of thin air, red, green,

Delighting

The heart like wishes or free

Peacocks blessing

Old ground with a feather

Beaten in starry metals.

Your small

Brother is making

His balloon squeak like a cat.

Seeming to see

A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,

He bites,

Then sits

Back, fat jug

Contemplating a world clear as water.

A red

Shred in his little fist.

Read the poem. Write/discuss the figurative language that is applied in the poem.

Quiz1. What year did the confessional poem era start?

a. 1850

b. 1915

c. 1930

d. 1950

2. Why did these poets commit suicide?

a. Because they didn’t like who they were.

b. Because they hated everything that happened in their life.

c. Because they were depressed.

d. None of the above.

3. Who grew up with uncaring parents?a. Anne Sexton

b. Sylvia Plath

c. Robert Lowell

d. John Berryman

4. Who tried to commit suicide by overdosing pills?a. John Berryman

b. Robert Lowell

c. Anne Sexton

d. Sylvia Plath

5. Other than this poet, his father also committed suicide.a. John Berryman

b. Robert Lowell

c. Anne Sexton

d. Sylvia Plath

Links “Sylvia Plath Biography.” Biography. Web. 16 Dec. 2012

"John Berryman." Wikipedia. Wikimedia Foundation, 12 Apr. 2012. Web. 16 Dec. 2012.

"John Berryman." - Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, 2012. Web. 16 Dec. 2012.

“Anne Sexton’s Life.” Modern American Poetry. English Illinois. 2001 March 18. 16 Dec 2012.

“AP English and Comp.” K12. Web. 2008. 12 Dec. 2012.

“Ariel Poem.” Wikipedia. Wikipedia Foundation. 7 April 2010. Web. 16 Dec. 2012.

“Robert Lowell.” UNCP. Web. 16 Dec. 2012.

“Robert Lowell.” Modern American Poetry. English Illinois. 16 Dec. 2012.