ABSTRACT
When the phrase “confessional poetry” erupted into common usage with M.L Rosenthal’s review of Life Studies in 1959, few could have predicted the shape of things to come. This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book outlines a new way of thinking about the contemporary climate of ubiquitous surveillance by exploring the complex things that lyric poetry can tell us about the ways that confession, self-expression, self-disclosure, overhearing, visualisation and subjectivity were mediated in the twentieth century. It demonstrates the extent to which sight and hearing overlap in the historical period of J. Edgar Hoover’s domination of the FBI, a phenomenon that speaks to the emergence and interconnectedness of a particular kind of surveillance and a particular kind of poetry in a specific place and time.
