'Poetry as Confession' was an influential 1959 article written by M. L. Rosenthal, reviewing the poetry collection Life Studies by Robert Lowell.
The article was published in The Nation on 19 September 1959, and was later collected in Rosenthal's book of selected essays and reviews, Our Life In Poetry (1991).
"Rosenthal proceeds to compare the current day approach with that of the poets of the Romantic period such as John Keats.
S. Eliot and Ezra Pound are brought up, in the context of the influence of the Symbolists, and how they take us to the "forbidden realm" although "a certain indirection masks the poet's actual face and psyche".
His speaker is unequivocally himself, and it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal.