Blood ink in paper phlegm: a psychoanalytic review on the cathartic use of post-World War II’s confessional poetry

Abstract

The general objective of this work was to seek to analyze, through the psychoanalytic bias of sublimation, how the literary genre of Confessional Poetry presented itself in the scenario of the late 1950s, investigating the poetic narrative contained in the threshold between the author self and the lyrical self, the psychosocial contexts that surrounded the creation of his works, and how they manifested themselves in these productions through linguistic artifices, promoting catharsis of traumatic content. To this end, a narrative review of the literature was carried out in the digital databases CAPES and SciELO Journals, and of physical material (articles, magazines etc.), together with the psychocritical analysis of the work “Ariel” (1965), by the confessional poet Sylvia Plath, integrating Confessional Poetry, Psychoanalysis and Literary Psychocriticism with the creative operational panorama in the post-war zeitgeist. It was concluded that there was in fact a poetic conception through the sublimation of the writer’s experiential traumatic material, from the use of explicit and implicit signifiers related to the Two Great Wars — interconnecting the psychosocial context of her time to the barbarism of this martial imaginary. However, there was a need for more research to broaden the perspective on which alternative mechanisms and specific apparatuses were taken by other confessionalists to deal with the probed impact.