"Berryman resented the “confessional” label, but it makes sense to think of The Dream Songs alongside Lowell’s Life Studies (1959), W.D. Snodgrass’s Heart’s Needle (1959), Anne Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), and Sylvia Plath’s posthumous Ariel (1965). For all of these poets’ many differences, and notwithstanding the craft that went into each of their volumes (these were far from artless confessions), the books tend to follow a similar arc: the wayward poet makes a putatively shameful disclosure about his or her life, usually involving some breakdown of the nuclear family (the given family of childhood, the made one of adulthood, or, often, both), only to have the form within which they make that disclosure, the well-made lyric poem, lead them back, by poem’s end, into the boundaries of respectable domesticity." Kamran Javadizadeh NYRB

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