'Poetry as Confession' was an influential article written by M. L. Rosenthal, reviewing the poetry collection Life Studies

Life Studies

Life Studies is the fourth book of poems by Robert Lowell. Most critics consider it one of Lowell's most important books, and the Academy of American Poets named it one of their Groundbreaking Books. The book won the National Book Award for poetry in 1960.-Publication:Life Studies was first...

by Robert Lowell

Robert Lowell

Robert Traill Spence Lowell IV was an American poet, considered the founder of the confessional poetry movement. He was appointed the sixth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress where he served from 1947 until 1948...

. The review is credited with being the first application of the term of confession

Confession

This article is for the religious practice of confessing one's sins.Confession is the acknowledgment of sin or wrongs...

 to an approach to the writing of poetry. This led to an entire movement of 20th Century poetry being called 'Confessional poetry'. The review was published in The Nation

The Nation

The Nation is the oldest continuously published weekly magazine in the United States. The periodical, devoted to politics and culture, is self-described as "the flagship of the left." Founded on July 6, 1865, It is published by The Nation Company, L.P., at 33 Irving Place, New York City.The Nation...

on 19 September 1959

1959 in poetry

Nationality words link to articles with information on the nation's poetry or literature .-Events:* In the United States, "Those serious new Bohemians, the beatniks, occupied with reading their deliberately undisciplined, protesting verse in night clubs and hotel ballrooms, created more publicity...

, and was later collected in Rosenthal's book of selected essays and reviews, Our Life In Poetry (1991). Some material from the essay was used in an essay Rosenthal published the following year in his book The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction.

The review opens with a reference to Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson

Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was an American poet. Born in Amherst, Massachusetts, to a successful family with strong community ties, she lived a mostly introverted and reclusive life...

 and noting the new trend towards confession in poetry:
Rosenthal proceeds to compare the current day approach with that of the poets of the Romantic period

Romanticism

Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

 such as John Keats

John Keats

John Keats was an English Romantic poet. Along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, he was one of the key figures in the second generation of the Romantic movement, despite the fact that his work had been in publication for only four years before his death.Although his poems were not...

. The Romantics, he asserts, found "cosmic equations and symbols". Keats transcended his "personal complaint", and lost it in the "music of universal folornness". Rosenthal introduces the adjective "confessional" when hew moves on to Walt Whitman

Walt Whitman

Walter "Walt" Whitman was an American poet, essayist and journalist. A humanist, he was a part of the transition between transcendentalism and realism, incorporating both views in his works. Whitman is among the most influential poets in the American canon, often called the father of free verse...

 and his Calamus poems

Calamus (poem)

The "Calamus" poems are a cluster of poems in Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. These poems celebrate and promote "the manly love of comrades"...

:
T. S. Eliot

T. S. Eliot

Thomas Stearns "T. S." Eliot OM was a playwright, literary critic, and arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century. Although he was born an American he moved to the United Kingdom in 1914 and was naturalised as a British subject in 1927 at age 39.The poem that made his...

 and Ezra Pound

Ezra Pound

Ezra Weston Loomis Pound was an American expatriate poet and critic and a major figure in the early modernist movement in poetry...

 are brought up, in the context of the influence of the Symbolists, and how they take us to the "forbidden realm" although "a certain indirection masks the poet's actual face and psyche". But, Rosenthal continues,