“All the Long Gone Darlings”: Using Confessional Poetry as a Lens to View the Western Cultural Symbolical Formations of the Female Body

Western society has long cast an unflinching eye on the female body. The female form is frequently portrayed in books, film, and media in a variety of unrealistic ideals, poised somewhere between hypersexuality and asexuality. This paradox illustrates the infinite question of the symbolical import of the feminine form as situated within culture and within the self. One “voice” that has attempted address this question in modern American culture has been contemporary American poetry, most notably the “confessional” school of poetry. Arguably beginning with the work of Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, the “confessional” school of poetry started a tradition in contemporary American poetry of the merging of the speaker and the poet. The result has been that the female body has been given an unabashedly candid language through which it can “answer” the questions posed to it by the culture at large. Female poets such as Kim Addonizio and Sharon Olds inhabit the body on the page, through vivid and disturbing language, addressing the conflictual and ambivalent nature of what it means to have a female body. Drawing upon psychoanalytic theory, literary analysis, and gender theory, this paper examines the way in which contemporary female confessional poetry addresses what it means to have a body. Using textual examples, this paper examines how the constraints of form and structure mirror the corporeal boundaries of the female body to merge the reader's experience of moving through the poem and moving through the culture.