Our lecture today on Confessional poetics brought up the argument that the 'genre' was a reaction to the aesthetics of Modernism; The focus on the 'self' was expunged by Modernism, and yet was embraced wholeheartedly by poets such as Lowell, Sexton, Berryman, and Plath. While, to some extent I agree with the argument - for of course, over time poetry will evolve, and evolution comes from the diversification and adaptation of other ideas from established genres - I feel that it misses what, to me, was a large part of Modernism.
My understanding of Modernism largely came from a direct comparison to its offspring, Postmodernism, which conforms to my statement of poetic development. Whereas Modernism focused on a unity, a grand narrative, an inherent quality shared by humanity, Postmodernism focused on fragments, on disparation, on difference. Confessional poetry, to me, seems to straddle both of these ideas; With a reversion to the Poetic I, it allows a fragmented view of a fragmented individual, simultaneously appealing to that Modernist unity which allows empathy and connection. I spoke in an earlier post of Subjectivity, and the quest to enrich our worldview with the jigsaw pieces of individual identities, and I believe this is what Confessional poetry does. Not every human is the same, and we certainly have not had the same experiences, but an invitation to view the experiences of others, to see their innermost thoughts and feelings, allows us a more comprehensive view of what it is to be human. With any luck, we may not share Plath's pain or father issues, we may not find ourselves in Lowell's marital difficulties, but the knowledge that other people do feel and experience these things gives us a broader scope of the variants in emotion. As I have said before, it is emotion and empathy that connects us, and sometimes it takes a direct form to enable that connection.
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