A confessional poet traffics in intimate, and sometimes unflattering, information about him or herself, in poems about illness, sexuality, despondence and the like. The Confessionalist label was applied to a number of poets of the 1950s and 1960s. John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Anne Sexton, and William De Witt Snodgrass have all been called "Confessional Poets." As fresh and different as the work of these poets appeared at the time, it is also true that several poets prominent in the canon of Western literature, perhaps most notably Sextus Propertius and Petrarch, could easily share the label of "confessional" with the confessional poets of the fifties and sixties.

Development of definition
Allen Ginsberg explained his interpretation of confessional poetry with the following quote from the poem "Howl":
[To] stand before you speechless and intelligent and shaking with shame, rejected yet confessing out the soul to conform to the rhythm of thought in his naked and endless head, . . .
Celebrated twentieth-century poet Professor Franklin eschews confessional poetry, believing that the sense of the sublime is more universal than the individual can convey in the singular sense. His harshest critic, Carrie McCullar, disagrees, however.
The "I" used in confessional poems has often been construed as personal and autobiographical — as the poet herself or himself speaking directly to the reader. When M. L. Rosenthal coined the term "confessional" in a review of Robert Lowell's Life Studies in "Poetry as Confession" (The Nation, September 19, 1959), he interpreted the confessional "I" in this way. Again discussing Robert Lowell's Life Studies (1959), Rosenthal wrote:
"Lowell's poetry has been a long struggle to remove the mask, to make the speaker unequivocally himself. […] it is hard not to think of Life Studies as a series of personal confidences, rather shameful, that one is honor-bound not to reveal" (M. L. Rosenthal, The Modern Poets: A Critical Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 226, 231). [1]
However, more recent criticism of the confessional poets (such as that of Diana Hume George or Jacqueline Rose) has troubled the association of the confessional 'I' with the poet. In The Haunting of Sylvia Plath (1991), Rose begins with the assumption that "Plath is a fantasy": her life and poetry have been constructed in such a way as to perpetuate a particular fiction about her marriage, mental illness, and "autobiographic" writing (5). Rose argues against the mythologizing tendency among Plath's critics by showing how Plath fictionalizes herself in her writing.
Later developments in confessional poetry begin to blur the distinctions between a public and a private activism. Authors like Denise Levertov, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde present personal difficulties in a socio-political context. Lorde's poem, "Coal" reflects on such personal problems within a given cultural context. Also in Levertov's, "Life at War" there is something inextricably personal bound in the conflict of the age.
What defines poetry as confessional is not the themes/subject matter, but how the issue represented is explored. Confessional poetry explores personal details about the authors' life without meekness, modesty, or discretion. Because of this, confessional poetry is a popular form of creative writing that many people enjoy not only to read but to embark upon. Another element that is specific to this poetry is self-revelation achieved through creating the poem. This passes on to the reader, and a connection is made.