ABSTRACT
W.O. Snodgrass was among the first Americans to write"Confessional" poetry and one of the first to move beyond it. Other poets with whom Snodgrass associated during graduate school were inventing the poetry that evolved in the 1960s as "Confessional" (M.L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets, 1960) or "introspective" (Williamson, 1984). Innovators such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell brought patrician sensibilities to this new poetry. By contrast, aspiring writers such as James Wright, James Dickey, and Snodgrass, who went to college on the G.1. Bill, brought the perspective of working-class families and military service, sometimes including combat. After completing their undergraduate educations (Snodgrass at Geneva College), these poets looked to mentors in graduate school who sought to escape the legacy of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and Robert Frost. Eschewing the obscurity and "impersonality" that Pound and Eliot had elevated to poetic orthodoxy, these writers set directness and sincerity as their goal. At the University of Iowa, Snodgrass studied under Lowell, who credits his pupil with liberating Lowell's poetics.
