Irony and Yearning in W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, and Allen Ginsberg: a Close Reading of Three of Their Confessional Poems
Irony and Yearning in W.D. Snodgrass, John Berryman, and Allen Ginsberg: a Close Reading of Three of Their Confessional Poems

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines three poems by three American poets – W. D. Snodgrass, J. Berryman and A. Ginsberg who subscribe to the confessionalism of the 1950s and 60s being largely spared the complication of clinical depression which plagued the other three major confessionalists – Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Robert Lowell. Not having a severe form of it – Snodgrass – has resulted in generally more light-hearted texts by them containing irony and yearning which differ in mood from the rather mostly bleak verses of the other three mentioned American poets. These three, however, were also perfectly capable of their own personal darkness represented in verse and in turn did not fail to scandalize with the content of some of their verses. The paper also discusses the power of sincerity in these autofictional poems vs what could have been mere authenticity of dissimulated lived experience. As such, it aims to dispel possible attacks of self-display or glorification, as well as of possible victimization that autofictive poets, including some of the ones under scrutiny, have come under.

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