Phillips, Robert (Schaeffer) - L. S. Dembo
L. S. DEMBO
As a description of a general tendency in post World War Two American poetry, the term "confessional" is probably useful enough. Robert Lowell casually applied it to his own work in a Paris Review interview several years ago and M. L. Rosenthal succeeded in giving it currency in The New Poets (1967). Now [in The Confessional Poets] Mr. Phillips has come along with a whole book on the subject, seeking to establish the emergence of a "movement" or "school" or, at the very least, a "mode." Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and possibly Anne Sexton are the cofounders … and John Berryman, Theodore Roethke, and Sylvia Plath are among the chief practitioners. Mr. Phillips summarizes their work thus:
It is highly subjective.
It is an expression of personality, not an escape from it.
It is therapeutic and/or purgative.
Its emotional content is personal rather than impersonal.
It is...
[The entire page is 512 words long]
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