The Reflection of Confessional Poetry Motifs in English and Persian Poetry:A Study of Robert Lowell’s and Sohrab Sepehri’s Selected Poems

Macha Louis Rosenthal (1917-1996) for the first time introduced the term Confessional Poetry in his study on Robert Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), a volume of poetry. Among the most significant properties of Confessional Poetry are the outcry of inner feelings and emotions, depicting hidden desires and aspirations, revealing personal and family privacies, presenting particular real names of people and places, using simple and lucid language, Verisimilitude, and finally attracting reader’s confidence toward the text and its atmosphere. Such motifs can be traced in many Persian modern poets such as Sohrab Sepehri (1928-1980). Sepehri’s »The Sound of Water’s Steps« and Robert Lowell’s »My Last Afternoon with Uncle Devereux Winslow« are two typical pieces of confessional poems which are discussed and reviewed in this article. Hence, by comparing and presenting details of confessions in their two selected poems, this research attempts to unfold their anxieties as modern poets and to clarify their mental stream of confessions.