Who make up the confessional poets 1 John Berryman 2 Robert Lowell 3 Sylvia Plath Robert Lowell Elizabeth Bishop were close friends Wrote letters together Concerned about what one thought of the other s work Robert Lowell 1 Skunk Hour The poem starts with the speaker reflecting on a coastal town in Maine His observations track an elderly wealthy woman who seems to have a ton of property but who is quite alone in her older years Then he starts to describe the things that have begun to go wrong with the place the millionaire who lived there for the summer is gone the town decorator seems depressed and poor and now the whole place is looking pretty sad for fall Then the speaker shifts the focus to himself He remembers a drive he took through the town one night and what he saw as well as how he felt It all seems pretty gloomy and he admits to being depressed and feeling kind of crazy What he observes after he lets us in on his mental state seems to be affected by how he s feeling and as the poem progresses it gets pretty bleak Skunk Hour expresses the turmoil of Lowell s personal life at this crucial point It is a poem framed by matriarchal images and built around an analogy between art and voyeurism It also dramatizes an inner debate between the demands of formality and discretion on the one hand and on the other the longing for an open and candid poetry that would capture the life of a privileged and educated American man in the middle of the 20th century Themes madness isolation home society class 2 Home after Three Months Away This poem was a reflective piece about life after returning home from abroad no specifics The speaker is contemplating his life and using his baby daughter for perspective Though I am forty one not forty now this was a subtly ironic darkly amusing way of putting his reflection what difference does a year actually make The precursor to twenty one perhaps the best indicator of an American s coming of age is agonizingly excitingly and after this benchmark what else can one be excited for Age thirty is another significant year but why are twenty nine and thirty one neglected in comparison Ages are funny because they mean nothing they are man made time counters for people to gauge themselves against He begins the poem by noting the absence of his daughter s former caretaker then he describes his interactions with his daughter as he s bathing her But by the end of the poem he is focused on the subject of his fragile mental state which he compares to the flowers in the garden Bushed by the late spring snow they cannot meet another year s snowballing enervation 4 Lowell concludes the poem with the line Cured I am frizzled stale and small 5 The line implies that the treatments he received at McLean Hospital left him feeling worse 3 Memories of West Street and Lepke It s about the speaker being in jail for a year where he perhaps wrote the poem and sympathizes with his inmates blacks Jews the Mafia etc The poet was imprisoned for protesting against the Viet Nam war and being a civil activist So the theme is the injustice of men to other men and being imprisoned that cuts you off from your family and normal life Louis Lepke Buchalter 12 February 1897 4 March 1944 was a Jewish American mobster and head of the mafia hit squad Murder Inc during the 1930s After Dutch Schultz request of the Mafia Commission for permission to kill his enemy U S Attorney Thomas Dewey the Commission decided to kill Schultz in order to prevent the hit Buchalter was assigned by Calabrian immigrant Albert Anastasia to assassinate Schultz In 1936 Murder Inc killers acting on Buchalter s orders gunned down a Brooklyn businessman named Joseph Rosen Buchalter became the only major mob boss to have received the death penalty in the United States after being convicted of that murder I think the poem is like an elegy to Jews and uses Lepke because he was a criminal on death row just like the Jews in the holocaust The poet uses this poem to get our sympathy just like the Jews with their pretentious holocaust that they have firmly conditioned in our brains Lepke was a nickname for Louis Buchalter a Russian mobster The poem takes place in jail as can be seen by references to pajamas and cells and also from more obvious occurrences like jailbird The things forbidden to the common man which were quite ordinary would be unheard of to those in jail The end of the poem is my favorite part because of how Lepke is portrayed he is lobotomized a fragment of his former self which works well because Lepke dodged the electric chair several times before March 4 1944 Sylvia Plath 1 Daddy The speaker creates a figurative image of her father using many different metaphors to describe her relationship with him He s like a black shoe that she s had to live in like a statue that stretches across the United States like God like a Nazi like a Swastika and finally like a vampire The speaker faced with her father as a giant and evil Nazi takes the part of a Jew and a victim Yet with this poem the speaker gets her revenge claiming that she s killed both her father and the man she made as a model of her father her husband This poem shows her struggle to declare that no matter how terrible her father was and how much he remains in her mind she is now through with him 2 Lady Lazarus Lady Lazarus begins by telling us that she has done it again What is this it We don t know at first She compares herself to a Holocaust victim and tell us that s she s only thirty years old and that she has nine lives like a cat We soon figure out that it is dying but like the cat she keeps returning to life She tells us about the first two times that she almost died and tells us that dying is an art She says that dying is a theatrical event and imagines that people come and see her do it In fact it starts to seem as if she s performing a third death in front of a crowd at a circus or carnival She compares herself again to Holocaust victims and imagines that she s been burned to death in a concentration camp crematorium At the end of the poem she resurrects or returns to life from death once again and she eat s men like air Themes Death Suffering Violence John Berryman The Dream Songs Jack Kerouac Big Sur Allen Ginsberg Howl Howl appears to be a sprawling disorganized poem But it s not It consists of three sections Each of these sections is a prolonged riff on a single subject You could even think of the poem …