The Coming on of Night

Confessional poetry has a long and storied history. Some would draw it back to Saint Augustine, who was one of the first to write about his personal struggles as important enough to be worth contemplating. It became even more popular during the Romantic Period, when writers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote “The Confessions,” and with the rise of democracy. Walt Whitman, one of the first American poets, differentiated himself and set a tone for what would become American poetry by writing about “ordinary” people, as opposed to writing about royalty, politicians, and heroic figures of antiquity. The heyday of Confessional poetry though was the 1950s and 1960s, when critic M. L. Rosenthal coined the term in his review of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies in the Nation. In addition to writing about his ordinary life, Lowell wrote poems about his topics intimately, i.e., as though he were “confessing” some personal information to a friend.

That era of poetry sprang up as a response to the perceived stuffiness and excessive formalism of the academic poetry of the 1940s and 1950s. Confessional poets tend to write more freely about personal matters that are often deemed taboo, including mental illness, sexual abuse, drug use, or any topic a person may otherwise feel they would need to hide from polite society. They were writing against the backdrop of 1950s America, an era known for a culture of homogony and surface-level appearances of happiness and well-being.

For women in particular writing Confessional poetry meant challenging the stereotype of what a typical woman should be. It meant admitting to having difficulties with family life, expressing a desire to enter the working world, or dealing with issues that were otherwise verboten to women. It meant disposing of the notion that every woman wanted to be a housewife and mother and exploring the darker aspects of the “American Dream.” It was a precursor to the late-60s Hippie movement, which put on full display a youthful generation’s quest for personal freedoms and an end to social restraints.

Some of the most prominent female Confessional poets include Maxine Kumin, Anne Sexton, and probably the most famous example, Sylvia Plath, whom Linda Pastan beat for the Dylan Thomas Award in her senior year at Radcliffe. Like Plath, Pastan writes about issues that specifically affect women, but her life and work took distinctly different turns, which made her a somewhat controversial figure among 1970s feminists. Whereas Sexton, Kumin, and Plath began their careers in the 1950s, Pastan took a break from writing for 10 to 14 years to focus on family life.

By the time she began writing and publishing again, interest in Confessional poetry was waning. Women had achieved greater opportunities and a greater sense of self-empowerment and social mobility, but the victories also triggered conservative backlash. The seventies were years of disillusionment for those involved with protest movements that were convinced imminent social revolution would change the face of “ordinary life” for everyone and that the powerful would face a reckoning. Those of the counter-culture had lost friends to overdoses, police brutality, the war, illnesses, and suicide. Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin, for prominent examples, had each died by suicide.

This disenchantment led to the “post-confessional” style, in which poets continued discussing similar subject matter as their predecessors, but in a way that Rubins, who wrote the introduction to the book Post-Confessional Poets suggests, is less intense. Pastan says that while her poems seem to be about everyday domestic concerns, she is, “Indeed interested, you might say obsessed, not with ordinary life per se but with the dangers lurking just beneath its seemingly placid surface.” Pastan also identifies her heritage as a Jewish woman as feeding her sense of uneasiness. As she writes in her poem “The Cossacks,” “For Jews the Cossacks are always coming” and “therefore I celebrate / New Year’s Eve by counting / my annual dead.”

The subject matter Pastan explores is the anxiety that people feel in spite of all the material success America seems to have achieved. Much like the speaker of Pastan’s poems, many people felt there were potential dangers always lurking. During the 1980s, when Pastan was coming to greater prominence, Americans’ focus on material success increased. Many were dealing with the aftereffects of the war in Vietnam and the fear of nuclear war with Russia. During the 1990s-2000s, America saw two economic downturns, multiple wars in the Middle East, and the continued struggle for women’s equality.

In 2001, when “The Coming on of Night” was originally published in Poetry Magazine, Pastan would have had more than enough reason to “confess” fears and anxieties in her poems, perhaps disillusionment with all that “ambition” had brought her, and a greater awareness of her own mortality. By this time in her life, the poet had witnessed the death of both of her parents and had experienced an auto accident that nearly killed her. In addition to reflecting a foreboding brought on by external threats, “The Coming on of Night” also demonstrates the poet’s personal reflections on mortality.