| This dissertation is an attempt to rehabilitate the term "confessional" and to rescue it from its presently compromised status. The label "confessional" has proved problematic from the inception of its application to Robert Lowell's poetry, as well as other poets of his generation. My redemptive efforts include an examination of the definitions and denotations of the "confessional" label, as well as an extensive survey of the history of the confessional utterance, beginning with the genre's prototype practitioner, St. Augustine. I subsequently trace the genre's venerable history with a brief review of some of its notable masters, among them Dante, Margery Kempe, Sir Thomas Browne, John Bunyan, as well as early American writers, such as Edward Taylor and Jonathan Edwards.;Having presented the genre's lengthy and honorable trajectory, I examine the reasons for the confessional genre's current demotion in literary reputation and how the genre has suffered as a result of contemporary misunderstanding of the form. My purpose in rehabilitating the confessional genre is so that contemporary poets, whose verse is an extension of this tradition, may be better understood and their verse appreciated as a continuation of the exalted confessional legacy. Specifically, I examine the poetry of Louise Gluck, Yusef Komunyakaa, Linda Gregg and Li-Young as representative and highly accomplished practitioners of the confessional genre. Furthermore, I show how these poets are not only "confessional" writers in the genre's traditional sense, but also demonstrate how they have revitalized and expanded the genre's possibilities through innovations and ingenuity in their handling of tone, persona, memory, landscape, mythology/folklore, audience, aesthetics, and spirituality. |
