I've been, for whatever reason, reading confessional poetry lately, and I've noticed that the great confessors are not at all similarly confessional, unless one is looking only at their subject matter. Yesterday, as a break from Joe Bolton, I started copying out Sylvia Plath's Ariel and was startled, almost shocked, by the difference in style. Here are a couple of comparative samples:

from Autumn Fugue

Joe Bolton

There was something greater to the sadness

Than simply the going away of your lover,

Or even our own past failure at love.

What sadness there was carried with it the weight

Of something intensely formal, and which would not

Be overcome by anything so commonplace.

from Sheep in Fog

Sylvia Plath

The hills step off into whiteness.

People or stars

Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

Bolton's stanza is composed of two complex sentences, which carve out an explanation. Yet though it is heavily weighted with abstractions, it mysteriously does not seem abstract. The lines, ostensibly free verse, are conjoined rhythmically: his words have a pulse, and, in a way, that sound is the solidity behind the abstraction. Try reading it aloud, and perhaps you will have a reaction similar to mine. "Intensely formal," that glorious phrase, here suits not only Bolton's intellectual and emotional examinations but also his diction, syntax, and grammar.

But Plath's stanza inverts almost everything I've said about Bolton's. She chooses solid nouns--hills, people, stars--and makes them seem unreal, primarily by pairing them with unexpected verbs ("hills step off") or subtly strange conjunctions ("people or stars"?). The lines are short, jagged; the sentence structure is bald and repetitive: subject, verb; subject, verb; subject, verb. As a result, the comma splice in line 3 feels almost like a blow. Given the ascetism of her syntax, that grammatically incorrect comma carries vast emotional weight. Something must be really wrong, I think to myself, if a poet this controlled doesn't use a period here.

By the way, today is Sylvia's birthday. She would have been 77. I did not plan to talk about her on her birthday, but these things happen.

Maybe tomorrow I'll write a bit about Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton.