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Confessional poetry gathered its concerns from two cultural forces: awareness of emotional vacuity of public language in America and insistent psychologizing of a society adrift from purpose and meaningful labor. This mode of poetry arose from experience of fifties in America, when country first used its mass media to probe and lament lack of cultural continuity. But before long, discontinuities became fads, glibly explained in shallow historical terms. Public discussion, like a voracious consumer, seemed to thrive on new models, a quick turnover, and sleek packaging. Analyzing (and often excusing or attacking) phenomena on basis of decade in which they occurred was to become a widespread habit. These are tranquilized Fifties, / And I am forty. Ought I regret my seedtime? queried temporally out-of-joint Lowell in his Life Studies (1959). This sectioning of personal and public growth by a calendric measure suggests that historical impotence is at hand. The fifties also witnessed a new understanding of mass man and his futilities: now it was a post-industrial society that provided his background, and sociologist identified his prototype with such terms as alienation, the lonely crowd, and inner-directed. Poets went against grain of this social atomizing, and yet reflected its inevitable, distorted enlargement of individual psychology. As public and social goals crumbled or were emptied of meaning by too much chatter or inflated rhetoric, private satisfactions grew more desirable even if less clearly defined. In a sense confessional poetry can be seen as one degraded branch of Romanticism, placing sensitivity of poet at center of concern. In other terms, it mockingly inverts nineteenth-century
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