Confessional poetry as a genre was first characterized by the critic M. L. Rosenthal in 1959. It has become a potent force, and its practitioners the poetic voices of our time. The poetry is highly subjective, written with frankness and lack of restraint, and focuses on the ugliness of life. Its leading practitioners, Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman, have all been recipients of the highest awards in literature, including the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award for Poetry. Robert Phillips, a critic and also a poet, here directs our attention to the genre in the first book on the subject. In addition to the poets noted above, he discusses the work of Theodore Roethke, Sylvia Plath, Stanley Kunitz, Delmore Schwartz, and Allen Ginsberg. Especially valuable are the author’s definition and historical review of the genre and his use of interviews and personal comments. An appraisal of the genre, his book is also a guide to new avenues open to poets writing today.
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American poet, author and editor, usually publishes under the name Robert Phillips.
Robert S. Phillips was born 1938 in Milford, Delaware and is the author or editor of some 30 volumes of poetry, fiction, criticism, and belles lettres and publishes in numerous journals. A graduate of Syracuse University's creative writing program, he is currently (May 2007) a professor of English at the University of Houston; he was also director of the Creative Writing Program there from 1991 to 1996. His honors include a 1996 Enron Teaching Excellence Award, a Pushcart Prize, an American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award in Literature, a New York State Council on the Arts CAPS Grant in Poetry, MacDowell Colony and Yaddo Fellowships, a National Public Radio Syndicated Fiction Project Award, a Syracuse University Arents Pioneer Medal, and Texas Institute of Letters membership. In 1998 he was named a John and Rebecca Moore Scholar at the University of Houston. [Portions of biographical sketch taken from Mr. Phillips' faculty home page at the University of Houston, http://www.uh.edu/cwp/faculty/phillip..., retrieved 11 May 2007.]