LANGUAGE IN INDIA

Strength for Today and Bright Hope for Tomorrow

Volume 18:7 July 2018
ISSN 1930-2940

Managing Editor: M. S. Thirumalai, Ph.D.
Editors: B. Mallikarjun, Ph.D.
         Sam Mohanlal, Ph.D.
         B. A. Sharada, Ph.D.
         A. R. Fatihi, Ph.D.
         Lakhan Gusain, Ph.D.
         Jennifer Marie Bayer, Ph.D.
         G. Baskaran, Ph.D.
         L. Ramamoorthy, Ph.D.
         C. Subburaman, Ph.D. (Economics)
         N. Nadaraja Pillai, Ph.D.
         Renuga Devi, Ph.D.
         Soibam Rebika Devi, M.Sc., Ph.D.
         Dr. S. Chelliah, Ph.D.
Assistant Managing Editor: Swarna Thirumalai, M.A.

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The Poetics of the Personal 'I':
Confessional Voice in Selected American Modernist Poems

Saif Ali ABBAS
University of Mosul

Abstract

The second half of the twentieth century witnessed the rise of a poetic tendency to self-expression, confessional poetry. Three different phenomena initiated this poetry: Civil Rights Movement, western social activism, and pathologisation of homosexuality. They have led to an intense reaction to the adopted system of sexual relationships, i.e. heteronormativity. Confessional poetry incarnates this reaction. This research tackles the poetics of the 'I' in the confessional poetry of Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Lowell. Their selected poems reflect their secrets, psychological conflicts, and implicit rejection of their unfortunate political reality. The most important result of this research is that the reading of the poetry of these poets cannot be done but in a historicized context.

Keywords: Pathologisation; Civil Rights Movement; Confession; Confessional poetry; value-free technician

Introduction

Confessional poetry is one of the Sapphic tendencies in modernist literature. It manifests the poet’s psychological world through uncovering the hidden side of his life. It discloses his secrets and hidden repressed desires through the confessional act. Robert Phillips asserts that the faith-based poet places very few "barriers between his self and direct expression of that self (The Confessional Poets 8). Confessional poetry admits wrongdoing, unconventional, suicidal, sadistic, masochistic, disastrous thoughts, which shock and mutilate our culturally received senses. The taboo state of nakedness is embraced by many poets. Confessional poetry is one of the poetic trends in modernist literature. Confessional poets tread the thin line between producing free texts that emerge out of their private lives, and the need to maintain a level of secrecy about their being.

Many writers in the Fifties, not just by the naturally promiscuous Beats, but also by the very proper Robert Lowell and the pure and lyrical Louise Gleick. In fact, this nakedness extends beyond the body and stretches itself across the form of the poetry itself, presenting the reader with a starkness which contrasts the clandestine government operations and suppression of artistic freedom characterising the McCarthy era. Confessional poetry necessitates the baring of the poet's naked self. Vulnerability, in this instance, is also self-assertion.

This is only the beginning part of the article. PLEASE CLICK HERE TO READ THE ENTIRE ARTICLE IN PRINTER-FRIENDLY VERSION.

Saif Ali ABBAS
Assistant Lecturer
College of Education for Humanities
Department of English
University of Mosul
Mosul
Iraq
alisayf60@gmail.com

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