Merchants of pathos: confessional poetry, publicity, and privacy in cold-war America

© 2013 Tyne Daile SumnerThe relationship between confessional poetry and cold-war culture in America is structurally important to our understanding of ongoing debates over the authenticity of the textual voice in confessional verse. Exploring the work of poets Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, this thesis provides an explanation for the tendency among both readers and critics to conflate the roles of poet and persona in assessments of confessional poetry. It is argued that the confessional poets deliberately manipulated the status of truth in their work to create the illusion of a publicly legitimate, yet authentically private self. This thesis does not, however, reduce confessional verse to simply poetic artifice. Rather, in the process of conflating poet and persona, the confessional poets fashioned an unprecedentedly complex culture of postmodern poetics. This thesis divides the poetic voice of confessional poetry into three sites of poetics, detailing how each complicates the status of truth in confessional verse. The first site, the ambiguity of confessional poetics, is characterized by the still-contested definition of confessional poetry and the indeterminate nature of persona in confessional verse. By blurring the distinction between autobiographical fact and poetic fiction, confessional poetry directly participated in national tensions over privacy by questioning the status of truth in acts of apparent revelation. Additionally, by applying rhetoric characteristic of the modern age of publicity, confessional poetry repeatedly advertises itself within the poetic text, acting to further blur the distinction between poet and persona. In the second site, lyric poetry, it is argued that lyric poetry’s long-established definitional connection to music allowed confessional poetry a dynamic relation to voice and sound. It is argued that the confessional poets utilized the inherent audibility of the lyric poem—in both live readings and recorded readings—to create the illusion of an authentic authorial event. In the third site, publicity, the role of the confessional poets as public figures is explored. Situating the themes of confessional poetry inside the larger privacy crisis of the cold-war era, this thesis illustrates the ways in which confessional poetry engaged with social and political tensions between public and private in order to complicate the status of its claims to truth. Noting the broad changes in post-war American culture, combined with an appreciation of the ambiguous status of truth in confessional poetry, this thesis illuminates the important role of confessional poetry in using the relationship between confession, publicity, national security, and privacy, to challenge ideas about the authenticity of poetic voice