The sacristy of Milan’s baroque sixteenth-century Jesuit church San Fedele maintains eight massive, intricately detailed confessional booths of heavy walnut carved by the brothers Giovanni, Giacomo, and Gian Paolo Taurino. All are topped with a pediment, sometimes crowned with a carving of a mitered pontiff or of Christ, while heavy wooden vases or urns frame either side of the triangular gable, the Doric columns which support the booths inlaid with delightful friezes of cherubs or of biblical scenes including Noah’s ark and the passion of Christ. As the Baroque painter Dosso Dossi remarked of the Taurino confessionals, “They sport the majestic appearance of classic constructions together with the levity of a work of art.”
The Taurino confessionals were themselves a novelty in the sixteenth century. The tradition of a hidden and anonymous architectural space in which the sacrament was to be enacted had been introduced by Charles Borromeo, the hyperactive and scrupulous bishop of Milan, in 1565. That would suggest that the San Fedele booths, completed between 1596 and 1603, could be the oldest examples still in use.
Based in Counter-Reformation principles, Borromeo’s innovation reflects the manner in which confession has evolved over the centuries, from public contrition before a congregation in the earliest centuries to private consultation with a priest to the ritualized and regimented space of the booth itself, originally designed with the grill’s hard physical division intended to prevent erotic liaisons between cleric and layperson. The booths are stolid and serious in appearance, intimidating and heavy in their implications. Confession connotates those same terms, which is part of the reason why the American poet W.D. Snodgrass—Protestant in upbringing and secular in perspective—eschewed its connection with the movement of poetic confessionalism of which he is often said to be the progenitor, simply telling Alexandra Eyle in The Paris Review that the classification “sounds like you’re some kind of religious poet, which I am not.”
If Snodgrass didn’t count himself as a religious poet, the same should not be said of his most celebrated student Anne Sexton, who died by suicide fifty years ago, on October 4, 1974. Author of eight poetry collections, for which her third Live or Die (1966) would win the Pulitzer Prize, Sexton is the consummate confessional poet, the writer whose verse functions as a type of public sacrament, an admission of being in pain and of having caused pain. “You, Doctor Martin, walk / from breakfast to madness,” writes Sexton in an address to Martin Orne, the psychiatrist who treated her for bipolar disorder when she was institutionalized in 1960 and who acted as a de facto confessor. “I speed through the antiseptic tunnel,” she wrote of her condition, “where the moving dead still talk / of pushing their bones against the thrust / of cure.” Even for an audience reading in the post-Romantic moment—as we all must read in the post-Romantic moment—such verse that admits the unequivocal pain of real life, in which the narrator of the poem and the poet herself are steadfastly synonymous, must have been shocking, though today the revolution that confessionalism ushered in has been so successful we expect nothing less from our poets.
When it comes to faith, Snodgrass objected too much. Whatever problems he may have had with critic M.L. Rosenthal’s 1959 piece in The Nation, which categorized colleagues such as John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and Sexton as “confessional” because of their nakedly honest treatment of mental illness and family discord, substance abuse, and sexual assault, Rosenthal could not be faulted for including “religious” as one of these poets’ distinctions.
It is a curious omission. “Poets of every era testify that the act of unburdening in a form of words…brings healing,” argues journalist John Conway in The Dark Box: A Secret History of Confession, as he explicitly compares his subject to verse. Returning to the confessional of Milan, consider how drama of the Taurino carvings is enacted within those booths, behind the solid walnut door where the penitent is separated from the priest by an iron grill, the stage on which the sinner asks for forgiveness. For nearly five centuries, the Taurino confessionals have heard every manner of sin admitted, every transgression forgiven, they have witnessed testaments of pride and envy, sloth and gluttony, lust and greed, of wrath. Within that coffin-sized enclosure, women and men have asked for forgiveness from God’s representative for every venial slight and every cardinal crime, from sins as common as a rude comment to ones as serious as murder. It is a place for sinners to catalogue—and perhaps thereby help them turn back from the path of—their transgressions.
In that way, despite Snodgrass’s protestations, the space of the confessional is not so different from his Heart’s Needle (1960), Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), Plath’s Ariel (1965), Berryman’s 77 Dream Songs (1969), and Sexton’s Live or Die. A student (along with Plath) of Lowell at Boston University and of Snodgrass at Kenyon College, Sexton held none of her mentor’s distaste for the clear religious implications of the designation of “confessional” poet, even telling a BBC interviewer that despite growing up a stolid Massachusetts liberal Protestant that she was “rather attracted to Catholicism and everyone thinks that I was a Catholic.”
Beyond questions of faith, there are many ways to approach the confessional poets—as a response, along with the Beats, the New York School, and the Black Mountain poets, to the tribulations of the postwar world and the suburban conformity that marked that period—within the long lineage of the first-person, lyrical narrators clearly delineated identities. Beginning with Sappho and exemplified by Wordsworth, that tradition is one of which Rosenthal might have said that it “removes the mask.” Or perhaps most damningly, confessional poetry might be seen as a symptom of mid-twentieth-century narcissism and exhibitionism, the upper-class martini set displaying the remnants of their therapy sessions for approval, a direct line linking Lowell and Berryman, Plath, and Sexton to the TikTok and X generation. That last evaluation, though helping to explain the decline of the confessional poets in subsequent critical estimation, also happens to be the most facile.
By mining their own often tortured experiences and indiscretions (with the exception of Sexton’s horrifying sexual abuse of her own daughter, later disclosed by the victim), the confessional poets took part in the venerable tradition of the religious autobiography. The name of the movement could hardly be incidental; they both psychoanalyzed the sacrament and sacralized psychoanalysis, in homage as much to Augustine as to Freud. This aspect of their work, I would argue, is the primary reason for attending to them today. Far more than being the precursors of the reveal-all social media influencers, the confessional poets fundamentally were makers of spiritual verse. Interpreting the popularity of the (mostly culturally Protestant) confessional poets as simultaneous with the openness of Vatican II, Giles Mebane Robertson, in an unpublished dissertation for Fordham University, The Ultraquists: Locating Religion in Confessional Poetry, writes that the otherwise secular movement “may serve as a substitute for religion for both writer and reader.” Robertson notes that, in particular, “Sexton covers a wide gamut of attitudes toward religion. At times, she’s seemingly full of piety. At other times, she seethes with irony.” And that is appropriate, since the confessional is a place of both piety and fallenness, of sin and its elucidation as a means to redemption. Because she was so cognizant of the religious implications of her own verse, despite telling the BBC reporter that she was an atheist, Sexton is among the most fully realized of the spiritual confessional poets.
That’s not necessarily how most critics would describe Sexton’s work, even while she has been quoted as saying “We are all writing God’s poem.” Because of her blunt exploration of her struggle with bipolar disorder, Sexton tends to be interpreted as a “psychoanalytical” poet in the mold of her teacher Snodgrass. But as with the scrupulous exercises of Ignatian spirituality or the draining self-criticism of Puritan autobiography, her stark, honest, and disturbing poems are a means of plumbing the depth of a soul. “Finger to finger, now she’s mine,” writes Sexton in the audaciously titled “The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator”—“I beat her like a bell. I recline… At night alone, I marry the bed.” For critics of a certain disposition, there might not seem to be anything “religious” about Sexton’s supposition here, but faith like sex has a manner of being sublimated (or being the same thing), and in the recounting of this lonely onanistic encounter, the poet gives voice to a suffering psyche, a pained soul, albeit one capable of self-release.
She writes that “I am spread out. I crucify,” the verb in the last sentence raises the question: What exactly is the subject? Herself? Her anatomy? Something else? Intertextual allusions abound. There is a bit of St. Theresa’s ecstasy here, although unlike the Seraphic and orgasmic theophany of that mystic, Sexton describes masturbation as an “annoying miracle” (although a miracle all the same), capable of allowing her to “break out of my body this way.” In her description of the act as “overturning, beneath, above,” there is an echo of John Donne’s “Before, behind, between, above, below.” There is sadness, disappointment, and trauma in this verse, but also the intimation of something greater; a lyric about masturbation, for sure, but also the about the yearning for what is ecstatic, sublime, transcendent.
Many contemporary critics refused to recognize such intimations. Poet and novelist James Dickey chastised Sexton in the New York Times Book Review, arguing that it “would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience”—an oddly censorious judgement coming from the author of the jarringly vivid scene of sodomized rape in his novel Deliverance. Equally foolish is the implied and outmodedly Cartesian division between mind and body, soul and flesh. Sexton may be the poet capable of describing both her avoidance of a physician-prescribed hysterectomy and of menstruation into middle age, but it would be dead wrong to confuse the physicality of such verse as an abandonment of the sacred. To the contrary. Like Theresa, like St. John of the Cross or St. Thomas à Kempis, Sexton is familiar with the dark night of the soul felt in the body. Her lines from “Wanting to Die”— “suicides have a special language. / Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build”—succinctly explain the particulars of depression in a manner clinical etiology simply cannot.
Sexton’s empathetic “The Starry Night” considers another suicidal genius in the person of Vincent van Gogh, making his most iconic painting an occasion for meditating on the ways in which our own being can be emptied out. After an abstract ekphrasis of the painting in which, she asserts, the “night boils with eleven stars” (the violence of whose verb few others would ascribe to Van Gogh’s piece), Sexton describes a surreal vision of the work in which “I want to die” (who is speaking? her? the artist?). She writes that an “old unseen serpent swallows up the stars. / Oh starry night! This is how / I want to die:/into that rushing beast of the night, / sucked up by that great dragon.” This is rhetoric that, with its exclamation mark invocation of wild nights, recalls Sexton’s poetic grandmother Emily Dickinson, but it’s also written with the prophetic urgency and strangeness of John of Patmos’s Book of Revelation. An apocalypse is being visualized, in the original sense of an unveiling, but also of kenosis, of the spiritual practice in which penitents empty out their very selfhood to make room for an infinite God. Sacred poets in the vein of Sexton are often mislabeled secular merely because they are not sectarian. The poet herself astutely notes in To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) that “There is no special God to refer to.” For her, faith is not a question of epistemology or even metaphysics—the signs and referents are always jumbled—and so a studied agnosticism is the only consistent response.
Nevertheless, that we are sinners in need of absolution is, to Sexton, a matter of empirical fact, whether God is real or not. “With Mercy for the Greedy” is dedicated to “my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession.” In the tradition of all those who see faith as deriving first from the work of ritual, Sexton concludes that “Need is not quite belief,” even as she does “detest my sins and I try to believe / in The Cross.” In a masterful lyric of the faithless who desires faith, Sexton writes that “I pray to its shadow, / that gray place,” but the promise of salvation remains elusive. The poet tried to take Ruth’s suggestion, petitioning a priest for the sacrament of extreme unction, more popularly known as Last Rites and often including confession, in the year before her death. He refused, responding that “God is in your typewriter.” Rare wisdom from a man of the cloth, who recognized, as did Sexton herself, that her poetry had been sacramental all along:
I was born
doing reference work in sin, and born
confessing it. This is what poems are.