From the 1940s through the 1970s, Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Randall Jarrell, Delmore Schwartz, and Sylvia Plath not only wrote some of the most enduring poems in our literature; they redefined our notion of what it means for a poet to write honestly. In their very different ways, poems like Lowell’s “Waking in the Blue” and Bishop’s “In the Waiting Room,” Schwartz’s “Genesis” and Berryman’s “Dream Songs,” made it possible for poets to put themselves at risk in their work in ways that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier.

Yet the achievement of this group of poets has always been easy to misunderstand. Almost immediately, the kind of self-exposure practiced by Lowell and Berryman, in particular, was labeled “confessional.” Ever since, the confessional school has been one of the most popular, and most easily ridiculed, in American poetry. But the usefulness of criticism depends on its metaphors, and in confession it found a bad metaphor for what the most gifted of these poets were doing.

The motive for confession is penitential or therapeutic: By speaking openly about his guilt and suffering, the poet hopes to make them easier to bear. Another possible motive is ethical: By refusing to join the conspiracy of polite silence around certain shameful subjects, he challenges us to shed light on our own dark places.

But the best poets of the “confessional” generation always approached their writing as artists, and their primary motive was aesthetic. When they turned to experiences like madness and despair and lust – as even Bishop and Jarrell, the least explicitly autobiographical of the six, sometimes did – they did so in order to make effective works of art, not in order to cure themselves or shatter taboos. To treat their poems mainly as documents of personal experience is not just to diminish their achievement, but to ignore their unanimous disdain for the idea of confessional poetry.

Plath scorned the notion of poetry as “some kind of therapeutic public purge or excretion”; Berryman insisted that “the speaker [of a poem] can never be the actual writer,” that there is always “an abyss between [the poet’s] person and his persona”; Bishop deplored the trend toward “more and more anguish and less and less poetry”; Lowell explained that even in “Life Studies,” usually considered the first masterpiece of confessional poetry, “the whole balance of the poem was something invented.”

Poetry, all of them agreed, has its own life, with only an ambiguous connection to the life of the person who wrote it. Set down that these poets were mentally ill, or alcoholic, or suicidal – as all of them were, in some combination or degree – and you still have not come anywhere near to explaining why they wrote as they did.

In fact, the most important thing that unites these six poets is not a style or subject, but a common starting point. Robert Lowell, Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, and Randall Jarrell were all born between 1911 and 1917, and came to maturity during the triumphant age of Modernist poetry. (Sylvia Plath, born in 1932, represents something of a special case.) All of them knew that the Modernists had achieved something epochal. “The generation that included Frost, Stevens, Eliot, Williams, Marianne Moore, Ransom,” Jarrell wrote, “would establish once and for all the style and tone of American poetry.” Lowell agreed that “never before have there been so many good poets in America, nor in England – unless we go back two hundred and fifty years.”

To write in the wake of such giants was a mixed blessing. The Modernists had restored poetry to the position of a serious art, one that could – as Lowell wrote – “take a man’s full weight and … bear his complete intelligence, passion, and subtlety.” But at the same time, their huge success left the younger generation at a disadvantage. A young poet in the 1930s was faced with a body of poetry and criticism so authoritative that it took courage, and ingenuity, simply to avoid being crushed by it.

The Modernists were an extremely diverse group, and they certainly had no program in common. But the critical interpretation of Modernism that held sway in America from the 1930s through the 1950s – what is known as the New Criticism – did present a certain influential vision of what poetry should be, and the best poets of the younger generation were educated, on the page and in the classroom, by New Critics like Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom.

The New Criticism was a complex body of thought, but its basic principle was drawn from T.S. Eliot, whose criticism was its central inspiration. In the famous essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” Eliot set the tone for an era when he proclaimed that poetry must be impersonal. The poet has, Eliot claimed, “not a ‘personality’ to express, but a particular medium … in which impressions and experiences combine in peculiar and unexpected ways.” Good poetry, therefore, “is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.”

By the 1940s, leading academic critics had turned Eliot’s elusive insight into a doctrine. In “The Well Wrought Urn,” Cleanth Brooks declared, “the poet is a maker, not a communicator”; it followed that a poem was not, as Wordsworth taught, “a man speaking to men,” but “a structure of meanings, evaluations, and interpretations,” “a pattern of resolved stresses.” Similarly, W.K. Wimsatt wrote in “The Verbal Icon” that “Judging a poem is like judging a pudding or a machine. One demands that it work.” It makes no more sense to ask what a poet means by his lines than what a chef means by his ingredients: “we have no excuse for inquiring what part [of a poem] is intended or meant.” Allen Tate, Lowell recalled, pronounced that “a good poem … was simply a piece of craftsmanship, an intelligible or cognitive object.”

The leading poets of the post-World War II period began to write in this literary climate, and at first they ardently embraced the principles of their teachers. With varying degrees of skill, they wrote poems that were ambiguous, allusive, symbolic, and impersonal – brilliantly so in the case of Lowell, lifelessly in the case of Berryman. But what unites them as a group is that each eventually rebelled against the New Critical understanding of poetry. In their very different ways, they attempted to break free of the styles and subjects that Modernism had considered suitable.

In Jarrell’s dramatic monologues and Schwartz’s family epic, Bishop’s tense plainspokenness and Berryman’s jagged comedy, the values of Modernism are tested, resisted, and transcended. As Schwartz wrote in 1954, “What the [old] literary methods … exclude from all but the privacy of the journal or the letter is brought to the surface and exposed to direct examination by the new method.” A few years later, Berryman denigrated Eliot’s “amusing theory of the impersonality of the artist,” and championed instead Whitman’s vision of the “poet not as maker but as spiritual historian.” Eliot had declared that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates”; Berryman and Lowell each published poems in which they included their home address.

Yet while these six poets broke with some of Eliot’s major precepts, in the end all of them would have agreed with his definition of a poem as “a verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling.” A verbal equivalent is not a record, transcript, or confession; it means using language in a deliberately artful and artificial way, in order to communicate to the reader not facts about the poet’s life, but the inner truth of his or her experience. The peculiar strength of these poets came from the way they treated new, intimate subjects with the discipline, seriousness, and technical sophistication they had learned from the Modernists. At a time when American poetry often seems split into two streams – one serious but abstract and theoretical, the other populist but banal and unchallenging – the example of these poets, who put their whole humanity into their art, is more valuable than ever.

This article is adapted from “The Wounded Surgeon: Confession and Transformation in Six American Poets,” to be published in April by W.W. Norton.