Masked Confessions: the Modernist Genesis of the Confessional Poem

Session Coordinator: Frances Dickey
University of Missouri, Columbia
107 Tate Hall
University of Missouri
Columbia, MO 65211
dickeyf@missouri.edu

Eliot in the Raw

Does volatile personal disclosure make for a “confessional” poem, or is it also (or primarily) a quality of style, what critics have called “authenticity” or “breakthrough”? How do texts and readers determine what is authentic; how or what does a text break through to or disclose? Recent scholarship addressing the work of Sylvia Plath—the “Confessional Poet” par excellence — puts aside questions of biography, breakthrough, and authenticity to examine how her work is highly stylized, constructed, and formal. As the definition of the “confessional” period begins to blur, then, is it possible to see how the work and poetic theories of such an impersonal high modernist as T.S. Eliot anticipate later “confessional” developments? This paper will turn specifically to Eliot's Four Quartets, examining how this work may be a prototype for later “confessional” poems, and suggesting ways that a text may negotiate so-called “confessional” stylistic criteria.

Joanie Mackowski
University of Cincinnati                         

Pisan Confessions

Pound's “Pisan Cantos,” particularly Canto LXXXI, continue to raise controversy over the question of the poet's acceptance or denial of guilt for his treasonous wartime activities. The terms of the controversy suggest that, either way, the voice of this poem (where it appears distinct from the ventriloquized voices of historical figures) is identical to that of the man Ezra Pound; “pull down thy vanity” is understood as confession or as a defensive refusal to confess. In the work of a poet so given to adopting dramatic speakers—after all, he presents even the main speaker of the Cantos as Ulysses, not himself—what does he do here that makes us understand this utterance as somehow more directly or genuinely his own? This paper investigates the “confessional” content of Canto LXXXI—is it stylistic? thematic? something about the kinds of details the speaker includes about himself?—in comparison with standard examples from Lowell and others to see what light this poem sheds on the literary periodization of confessionalism.

Frances Dickey
University of Missouri

The Parallel Courses of Donne and Eliot: Confession Follows Persona

This paper addresses T.S. Eliot's resurrection of critical interest in John Donne's poetry and contrasts uses of persona and confession in poems by both authors. Donne's later religious poems ("Holy Sonnets," "Corona") are accepted as straight-forward outpourings of religious struggle and ecstasy, while his earlier works quite blatantly make use of persona, scene, and dramatic moment for their "metaphysical" wittiness. Has there simply been a slipping of the mask over time or has Donne created more complex personae in his later poems? To what extent does the trajectory of Eliot's poetry across the course of his career mirror that of Donne? Furthermore, given literary and cultural differences between the Renaissance and the Modernist periods, how should the terms "persona" and "confession" be reinterpreted or requalified for each era? Finally, the origin-point of self-fashioning, which Renaissance scholars tend to associate with the late sixteenth century, is contested by medieval scholars who locate the cultural emergence and literary representation of persona development as early as the fourteenth century (and classicists see it in the classical period, and so on). What does this search for the origins of the personal in literature say about the contemporary state of scholarly reception (the impulse to perceive the poetic voice as either smoke and mirrors or pure transparency)?

Heather Marring
University of Missouri