Fatherhood in Confessional Poetry: One Facet of Men’s Autobiographical Writing

Recent scholarship on confessional poetry has focussed for the most part on either the relationship of this work to feminine experience and questions of gender and sexuality for women on the one hand or the problems involved in assessing the poetry’s artistic merit on the other. This essay argues that Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass can be read for the light their work casts on one facet of masculine experience: fatherhood. Setting poems by each poet which are either about or addressed to their daughters in the context of both earlier poetry of a similar kind and contemporary theories of fatherhood, the essay argues that a common feature in both poets’ work—loneliness—shows something worth noticing about Cold War masculinity and illustrates the value of reading autobiographical poetry without foregrounding questions of artistic merit.