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Fatherhood in Confessional Poetry: One Facet of Men's Autobiographical Writing

Confessional poetry is being redefined. The term has always been ambiguous. Sometimes it has been taken to describe the work of the small circle of Robert Lowell and three of his students - Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton and W D. Snodgrass - and at other times the poetry of intimacy and crisis famously defined by M. L. Rosenthal in a 1959 article, a delineation which incorporates a wider range of writers, such as Adrienne Rich and John Berryman, or even more broadly younger writers like Sharon Olds and Mark Doty. But over the last decade the very validity of the name has come into question, and the poets traditionally read through a confessional paradigm are being approached in new ways.There are two main challenges to the confessional paradigm. One is mounted in works of literary history such as Thomas Travisano 's 1999 Midcentury Quartet: Bishop, Lowell, Jarrell, Berryman, and the Making of a Postmodern Aesthetic and Adam Kirsch's 2005 The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets. Both Travisano and Kirsch reject the term confessional outright, Travisano rigorously and Kirsch dismissively. "In confession [criticism] found a bad metaphor for what the most gifted of these poets were doing," Kirsch writes, sketching instead a case for the metaphor that gives his book its title, taken from a line by TS. Eliot - that of the wounded surgeon (2005, x). Travisano devotes an early chapter of his study to an attack on what he names the "confessional paradigm," developing five lines of argument against the term. What Kirsch and Travisano have most clearly in common is their objection to what Travisano identifies in the first of his objections as "how the confessional paradigm has prejudiced, and is still prejudicing, artistic evaluation" (1999, 44). An emphasis on the matter of the confessions of the poetry has obscured, according to this line of argument, its creators' artistic achievements.1A slightly older but still forceful approach has taken what amounts to an opposing stance to this distinction between artistry and autobiography. Participating in the rise of critical histories and theoretical works emphasizing the connections between autobiography and gender, a number of critics have approached the genre of confessional writing more broadly as women's writing, exploring how writing works with and works out issues of women's experience and gender identity.2 The editors of the recent volume of essays After Confession: Poetry as Autobiography, Kate Sontag and David Graham, have counterbalanced a section on "Ethical & Aesthetic Considerations" with a section on "Women & Autobiography." Deborah Nelson's 2002 Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America discusses the representation of domestic space by Sexton and Rich as a response to the gendering of the home as a masculine enclosure, arguing that both poets "redefine the home, the location of autonomy, adulthood, and citizenship, as the womb" (2002, 111). And in a 2006 essay on confessional poetry and "the gendered poetics of the 'real,'" Elizabeth Gregory argues that the ambitious American poets of the 1950s can be seen as "embracing the 'feminine' confessional position," so that Berryman and Lowell, as well as Plath and Sexton, ought to be understood as exploring new terrain of feminine writing (2006, 37).The argument I would like to make in this essay is that we can also revisit confessional poetry as men's autobiographical writing. Neither rushing to make evaluative judgments about the poetry on the one hand, nor following a critical tendency to feminize autobiographical writing on the other, I suggest here that we read important poems of this now canonical body of work for the light that they cast on the experience of masculinity in the period. This is hardly an eccentric suggestion. Critical studies of masculinity have abounded over the last decade, and various shapes of homosocialism in the poetry of the period - though not in the confessional school itself- - have been explored in Michael Davidson's Guys Like Us: Citing Masculinity in Cold War Poetics. …