Three hospital poems: empowered confessional selves in Robert Lowell’s „Waking in the blue”, Anne Sexton’s „You, doctor Martin” and Sylvia Plath’s „Never try to trick me with a kiss”
Three hospital poems: empowered confessional selves in Robert Lowell’s „Waking in the blue”, Anne Sexton’s „You, doctor Martin” and Sylvia Plath’s „Never try to trick me with a kiss”

Summary/Abstract: This article examines three hospital poems by the American confessionalists Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Writing in the mid1950s, they opted for „unacceptable” topics which were related to their personal experiences. Typically, the poetry of these poets remains as challenging for the modern reader as it was for their contemporaries. In introducing shocking events and intimate details to their work, they made an important development to portraying lived experience in fiction, which did not come without attacks for their perceived „narcissism”. In this article I argue that their bold writing about difficult subjects has created empowered poetic selves which rather than reflect any narcissism on part of the authors, predate and invite interpretations of the „other”. Their reproduction of illness (depression) is, consequently, devoid of the standard metaphors associated with the respective disease.

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