Analysis

Answer

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  Confessional Poetry

  Poetry is often described as a form of verbal artistry. Through language as a poet can express a plethora of various imaginative interpretations of different subjects. Such creative utilization is not limited to flights of fancy, nor is it limited to describing the brighter perspective of life and emotion. Rather they can convey the darkest of imagination, the most troubling of ideas, and the most horrifying imaginations that a writer can conjure up (Takolander 371). If poetry is described as an expression of life, it should reflect joy, despair, happiness, suffering, and success or failure.  Confessional poetry is founded on this notion, given that it is not inspirational but rather personal. This paper aims to discuss confessional poetry by assessing its characteristics and features that make it unique from other forms of poetry.

  Confessional poetry is often described as the poet’s personal experience. Poets indicate that confessional theory often relies on an individual's life experience, reflecting from both the goof and the bad. On some occasions, confessional poetry can be contrasted with a condensed autobiography. The writer utilizes either a specific life experience or encounters accumulated for some time to develop an artistic vernal account of their existence. In contrast, it is regularly criticized as parallel to a form of self-loathing (Takolander 371). One thing that must be comprehended about confessional poetry is that it utilizes the author's pain to capture the reader's attention, instill the pain in them, and despair what the writer encountered (Agrawal 780). Having the readers realize the author's experiences can turn out in various possible manners with happy endings, only probable outcomes.

  Confessional poetry is based on personal interpretation. Poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath can be identified as the confessional poets of their era. Their poems demonstrated immensely and deeply troubling moments in their life that they use as an approach of conveying angst, despair, and suffering they encountered (Honsalies-Munis 143). This paper will assess the poem "Daddy" by Plath to demonstrate how this piece embodies the aspects of confessional poetry. When evaluating the poem "Daddy" Plath, it can be observed that the poem is a highly personal story of Plath’s relationship with her biological father. In the poem, the author details how she is bound to her father's memory, given that up to this day, she still cannot get over the shadow of her father, which is still significant in that life (Honsalies-Munis 143).

  Plath confesses how her father was an imposing character in her youth that she felt secured by him. For instance, Plath being the foot and her father the shoe. His subsequent death made Plath feel lost, miserable, and blames her father for abandoning her and her mother (Honsalies-Munis 143). Plath, the author of the poem, demonstrates how even in death, how she never lived up to his anticipations, how he dominated her life, and how she was never able to prove her value to her father, in the end, affected her immensely (Takolander 371). Towards the end, Plath elaborates on how she could never speak to her father again, given that there is no chance for them to be reconnected, and it is these thoughts continue to haunt her despite it being years since her father's death.

  Based on the above facts, the poem "Daddy" can be comparable to an autobiographical confession. The poem details the author's misery, sorrow, and regret over losing her father early and how this experience has continued to affect her until adulthood (Honsalies-Munis 143). The deeply personal nature of the poem, how inlays display Path's life, and how it details a deeply troubling and unique nature of her existence is, in essence, exactly what a confessional poem is all about.

  No assessment of Plath's work as a confessional poet is accomplished without a brief overview of her mental state. It is rather interesting to notice that the author committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. Based on different accounts of Plath's life, it is seen that she suffered from certain forms of severe mental issues that resulted in depression and anxiety (Takolander 371). It is based on these factors that it can be deemed that Plath's use of confessional poetry was an approach to coping with her life (Agrawal 780). The deeply striking and painful voice in her poem was a direct outcome of her unstable mental conditions. It was only through such mental disorders that she could gain the inspiration she necessitated to write her poetry.

  Conclusively, judging on what has been presented in this paper, it can be observed that Plath was an intensely disturbed person yet a poetic genius, given that she was able to draw to her pain and mental instability to develop confessional poetry that clutches the very soul of the audience and makes them think of the darkness within life. Generally, confessional poetry is described as the author's personal account. Below is a confessional poem by Plath, “Daddy.” 

  “Daddy”

  You do not do, you do not do
  Any more, black shoe
  In which I have lived like a foot
  For thirty years, poor and white,
  Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

  Daddy, I have had to kill you.
  You died before I had time—
  Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
  Ghastly statue with one gray toe
  Big as a Frisco seal

  And a head in the freakish Atlantic
  Where it pours bean green over blue
  In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
  I used to pray to recover you.
  Ach, du.

  In the German tongue, in the Polish town
  Scraped flat by the roller
  Of wars, wars, wars.
  But the name of the town is common.
  My Polack friend

  Says there are a dozen or two.
  So I never could tell where you
  Put your foot, your root,
  I never could talk to you.
  The tongue stuck in my jaw.

  It stuck in a barb wire snare.
  Ich, ich, ich, ich,
  I could hardly speak.
  I thought every German was you.
  And the language obscene

  An engine, an engine
  Chuffing me off like a Jew.
  A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
  I began to talk like a Jew.
  I think I may well be a Jew.

  The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
  Are not very pure or true.
  With my gipsy ancestress and my weird luck
  And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
  I may be a bit of a Jew.

  I have always been scared of you,
  With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
  And your neat mustache
  And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
  Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You—

  Not God but a swastika
  So black no sky could squeak through.
  Every woman adores a Fascist,
  The boot in the face, the brute
  Brute heart of a brute like you.

  You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
  In the picture I have of you,
  A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
  But no less a devil for that, no not
  Any less the black man who

  Bit my pretty red heart in two.
  I was ten when they buried you.
  At twenty I tried to die
  And get back, back, back to you.
  I thought even the bones would do.

  But they pulled me out of the sack,
  And they stuck me together with glue.
  And then I knew what to do.
  I made a model of you,
  A man in black with a Meinkampf look

  And a love of the rack and the screw.
  And I said I do, I do.
  So daddy, I'm finally through.
  The black telephone's off at the root,
  The voices just can't worm through.

  If I've killed one man, I've killed two—
  The vampire who said he was you
  And drank my blood for a year,
  Seven years, if you want to know.
  Daddy, you can lie back now.

  There's a stake in your fat black heart
  And the villagers never liked you.
  They are dancing and stamping on you.
  They always knew it was you.
  Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.