Sylvia Plath's confessional poetry is characterized by 4 main traits: intimate subject matter about taboo topics like death, trauma, and relationships; first person narration that invites readers to experience the poet's emotions; an autobiographical style where the poet and narrator are interchangeable; and careful crafting of lyrical elements like rhythm, metaphor, and allusion. Examples from Plath's poems "Daddy" and "Morning Song" illustrate her confessional style of openly addressing private feelings and experiences through structured verse.

1. Confessional Poem
PEMA DORJI,
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2. Outline
Definition
Features of confessional poem
Traits of Plath’s Confessional Poem
Examples of Sylvia's Confessional poem.

3. Definition
 The genuine strength of confessional poets,
combined with the pity evoked by their high
suicide rate, a romantic confusion between
poetic excellence and inner torment.

4. Definition cont.
Confessional poetry is a type of lyric
and narrative verse.
It deals with intimate experiences
and facts of poets own life.

5. Element and Style
Private experiences with feelings about
death, trauma, depression, and
relationships were addressed in this
type of poetry.
“I” is used more than “you”.

6. Confessional Poetry and its Features
Reveals something normally hidden or
unspoken.
Explores subject matter that isn’t usually
discussed out loud; challenges the line
between acceptable and not acceptable,
private and public.

7. Cont…
Focuses on personal life: family, relationships,
childhood.
Focuses on personal neuroses, personal
“issues,” illness, fears, conflicts, loneliness.

8. Traits of Plath’s
Confessional Poetry

9. 1. Intimate subject matter
 Focuses on subject matter once considered taboo. Issues
like drug abuse, sexual guilt, alcoholism, suicide and
depression, which were typically considered shameful or
embarrassing, were discussed openly.
 For example, in her poem “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath writes
about how much she hates her father: “Daddy, I have had
to kill you,” and later, “I have always been scared of you.”

10. 2. First Person Narration
 According to Poets.org,
 Confessional poetry is the poetry of the “I.”
 Allowing the reader to delve closely into the
thoughts and feelings of the author.

11. Cont.
 According to Edward Byrne, a published poet and English
professor at Valparaiso University,
confessional poets use first-person narration to
“widen the scope of the poem” and as a “tool to
increase a reader’s emotional
identification with the writer.” In essence,
confessional poems invite the reader to live
vicariously through the poem.

12. 3. Autobiographical by Design
 By nature, confessional poems are autobiographical, meant
to record dirty and often depressing thoughts of an author,
which is now commonly practice in countless
autobiographies, memoirs and essays.
 However, unlike other “I” poems, in confessional poems,
the speaker doesn’t just represent the poet; rather, the poet
and the speaker are one in the same and interchangeable,
and the speaker draws upon his or her own life as the sole
form of reference.

13. 4. Lyrical Craftsmanship
 It may be easy to assume that confessional poets
simply put pen to paper and poured out their
feelings in a free-flowing, not described.
 However, quite the opposite is true.

14. Cont.
 According to Poets.org,
the original confessional poets maintained a “high level
of craftsmanship” and paid careful attention to the use
of rhythm and intonation in their poems. W.D.
Snodgrass in particular, long considered a “father” of
confessional poetry, was a master of literary technique,
incorporating everything from metaphor to allusion to
aphorism in his works.

15. Plath on confessional poetry.
 “I think my poems immediately come out of the sensuous
and emotional experiences I have, but must say I cannot
sympathize with these cries from heart that are informed
by nothing except a needle or a knife, or whatever it is. I
believe that one should be able to control and manipulate
experiences, even the most terrifying, like madness, being
tortured, this sort of experiences with an informed and
intelligent mind.”
http://www.sylviaplath.de/[lath/uroff.html

16. Examples of Sylvia Plath's confessional
poetry.
 “Daddy, I have had to kill you.
you died before I had time—
marble-heavy, a bag full of
God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as a Fresco seal”- from Daddy

17.  “I’m no more your mother,
Then the cloud that distils a
mirror….”- Morning Song
 “I am Silver and exact”
“I am not cruel only truthful”- Mirror .

18.  “I have to live with overnight”
“I can’t keep away from it”
“it is dark, dark”
“small, taken one by one, but my god,
together” – The Arrival of the Bee Box.
 “if I could bleed, or sleep!”- Poppies in July

20. THANK YOU ALL
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