Carl Phillips: Confession, and the Model of George Herbert (January 2000)

Countering the assumption that confessional poetry was the invention of the 1960s, Carl Phillips argues that it is “one of the oldest modes in poetry.” He then looks at a range of poems by a poet we might not ordinarily consider confessional—George Herbert—demonstrating the “symbiotic relationship” between confession and craft, as he explores how confession, touching issues “that cannot be satisfactorily known,” requires that “the poem itself,” as a made thing, “must be an active participant in truth-telling.”