Sandra Gilbert progresses from Rosenthal’s phrase “the private life of the poet” to her own phrase “the personal crisis of the male poet” in order to arrogate Rosenthal’s definition of confessional poetry for her own purposes. “The male confessional poet,” she writes: “even while romantically exploring his own psyche observes himself as a representative specimen with a sort of scientific exactitude . . . . he has a curious calm confidence that even in madness he is in some sense at the intellectual
to draw a line between Plath`s persona and her poetry. They perceive Sylvia Plath´s shadow in each of her verses, poems that often revealed complex personal situation, too many private details to the point that her life and her work become indistinguishable, “the poet and the poems became one” (A.Alvarez 38). The entire mystery around the figure of Sylvia Plath awakes and feeds our tendency or the need to identify her as the protagonist of her poetry. This is the second paragraph and following for
Plus, she rescues many elements of the first wave and she combines them with new ideas such as the mechanization of the female sexuality, women’s choice (maternity or no maternity), and sexual liberation. The metaphors about literary maternity and childbirth were quite numerous in both 18th and 19th centuries, trying to put in a parallel skeleton the process of literary writing and pregnancy. As Elaine Showalter claims, “feminist criticism written in the biological perspective generally stresses
typical confessional poet, his poems are autobiographical without being dramatic. It seems that Merrill takes a long time to choose his words because he does not simply want to reveal everything at once, but gradually, through a feeling of being an incomplete, resentful man who lost something important to him, in memory-dressed images. Simple moments in his life become complex meditations. Judith Moffett articulates this kind of distance by comparing Merrill with a truly confessional poet, Robert Lowell