Two of the most famous confessional poets are Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. Both women wrote poetry that dealt with very personal and painful subjects in their lives. Their poetry was confessional in nature and Plath and Sexton were very troubled women who tragically took their own lives.

Sylvia Plath

(1932-1963)

The imagery and attitudes in her poetry have their base in her life experiences.

Plath set impossibly high goals for herself.

Plath wrote, "I think I would like to call myself 'the girl who wanted to be God.' Yet if I were not in this body, where would I be- perhaps I am destined to be classified and qualified. But, oh, I cry out against it"(Barnard 16).

Plath was a perfectionist and that drove her to succeed and fail at the same time. This created a kind of destructive energy, which presents itself in her later writings.

Nearly all of Plath's early poetry is death related. In "Temper of Time," Plath uses somber terms to describe the landscape:

An ill wind is stalking

While evil stars whir

and all the gold apples

go bad to the core.

Anne Sexton (1928-1974)

Anne Sexton was an American poet whose work is noted for its confessional intensity.

Beat poetry influenced nearly all American poets, but especially a group of "confessional" writers including Anne Sexton in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Sylvia Plath in the posthumously published Ariel (1965), who in her poetry joined an style of sarcasm and emotional intensity. Sexton and Plath were both deeply troubled figures who committed suicide.

 

Such 20th-century poets as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton wrote poetry in the confessional vein, revealing intensely personal, often painful perceptions and feelings.

http://www.inch.com/~ari/as4.html

Sharon Olds seems a natural heir to such melancholy talents as Ann Sexton and Sylvia Plath, but in reality 54-year-old Olds is anything but withdrawn and more-serious-than-thou. She comes across as filled with nervous energy and excitement. Having seen and talked to her in person, I know first hand that she still gets a little nervous during poetry readings.

Olds' new book, which follows the theme of "The Father" (1992), a series of poems about the death of the narrator's alcoholic father, is comprised of poems on somewhat broader themes -- family life, parenthood, romantic love. Olds divides this new book into five sections — "Blood," "Tin," "Straw," "Fire," and "Light" — each made up of fourteen poems whose dominant imagery is drawn from one of these elements. As Olds' readers have learned, her work's apparent simplicity can't hide the brutal honesty of her observations.

"She has written without embarrassment or apology, with remarkable passion and savagery and nerve, poems about family and family pathology, early erotic fascination, and sexual life inside marriage."

"This is an intensely moving collection by one of our finest poets."

http://www.salon1999.com/weekly/interview.html

"We need to know how bad we are, and how good we are, what we are really like, how destructive we are, and that all this often shows up in families. The more we learn about families, the more we learn about human nature -- about strength and positive things, and weakness and negative things. I feel there is actually a force for self-knowledge, driving us in our art to see ourselves more clearly and to better equip us to fight our tendencies to be dangerous."—Sharon Olds

-- Listen to Their Voices: Twenty Interviews with Women Who Write, by Mickey Pearlman [W.W. Norton]).

He began his career with embracing the high style of T.S. Eliot and ended it with the confessionalist theme that he followed from then on. This latter style was his most influential and presented a shift in American poetics. This style later characterized the works of the doomed John Berryman and absolutely controlled those of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. He taught both Plath and Sexton at Boston University.

After declaring himself a conscientious objector in a letter to President Roosevelt

during the Second World War, Lowell was jailed for one year.

Like so many poets of his generation, he had many physical ailments, which resulted in his dependence on drugs. He went through many unstable relationships and multiple marriages, seeking happiness that he would later come to realize was elusive. In the last days of his life, he tried to get out of another turbulent marriage, and he decided to return to an ex-wife. When the cab that picked him up at the airport arrived at her apartment, the cab driver turned around to find Lowell dead in the back seat, "lost in the middle of yet another desperate journey." http://www.randomhouse.com/boldtype/0600/lowell/