Which poet ranks as the most confessional of the confessional poets, Plath, Ginsberg, Bishop, or Lowell?Ginsberg: "Howl" and "A Supermarket in...

href="http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5650">Lowell (Sylvia
Plath's teacher) is noted as the innovator of confessional poetry that has--for good or
bad--had such a profound influence upon contemporary poetry. "Skunk Hour" is one of
Lowell's confessional poems in which he reveals the "I" of personal feeling and
experience within the context of the poem:

readability="7">

I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood
cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am
hell;
nobody's here--

However, Sylvia Plath's
"Daddy" is viewed by many critics to the best example of early confessional poetry, thus
making Plath the most confessional of the confessional poets. In some ways, it may be
taken as a metaphor though it was written to her father who died when she was age 8,
even though in the poem she says, "I was ten when they buried you." Since his death
occurred in 1940 while he was a professor at Harvard, Otto Plath was never a
Nazi.

Sylvia feels that his early death--which came through his choice
for medical neglect--had such a profound psychological hold upon her (she felt that his
death was tantamount to suicide since it may have been prevented with medical care) that
it was like a Nazi grip upon a Jew, hence the German-Nazi-Jew metaphor and imagery.

Not God but a
swastika
So black no sky could squeak
through.

Sylivia Plath's
suicide four months after penning "Daddy" raises the question for some critics of the
effect of confessional poetry upon poet as well as upon
reader.