Cyril Wong’s poetry: examining the confessional.

• Main Author: Goh, Jiamin.
• Other Authors: School of Humanities and Social Sciences
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2011
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities::Literature::English
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/45876
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

Confessional poetry is often understood as being solipsistic insofar as it turns inward in its examination of the individual, oftentimes resulting in self-absorption. With regard to Cyril Wong’s poetry, Leonard Jeyam has stated that “his is an art that works simply from a personal plane, and from within such a plane we have some of the most sensitive, articulate probings into the nature of one's self that have never been seen before in all of contemporary Singaporean verse.” This paper attempts to dispel this claim using Theodor Adorno’s assertion of the social nature of all lyric poetry- “the substance of a poem is not merely an expression of individual impulses and experiences. Those become a matter of art only when they come to participate in something universal by virtue of the specificity they acquire in being given aesthetic form”. It examines the ways in which Wong’s poetry participates in the universal and contributes to the social rather than disregarding it by being confessional for the confessional poem rather than for the poet. This is carried out through what Linda Hutcheon terms “textual narcissism”, the use of Hindu mythology and music terminology.