"Since M.L. Rosenthal's review of Life Studies in 1959, confessional poets like Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath have been read for clues that offer insight into the mental illnesses that haunt their autobiographies. Confessional poetry is often maligned as a genre defined by its autobiographical content rather than poetics. In turn, this has led to the misconception that confession's characteristic privacy, intimacy, and sincerity are effected by autobiographical facticity rather than rhetorical structures. My project reconceives of confessional poetry as a poetic style rather than as a school of poetry or content-based genre. Using Peter Brooks's definition of confession, "to know oneself and make oneself known," I propose that lyric confession is based on juxtaposition of language that advertises privacy with language that advertises private experience less. I locate this in the construction of self-conscious language that foregrounds attention to an "I" juxtaposed with more impersonal aesthetic language, such as description or allegory. I demonstrate how this structure operates in the work of poets who critics have read as being private, cold, distant, or experimental, and who often deny foregrounding autobiographical details but are still recognized for writing poetry that suggests confession. Each chapter focuses on one poet's work and demonstrates how self-conscious language is mediated by another rhetorical device or mode. In the first chapter, I use Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III to show how she juxtaposes interiorized self-reflection with descriptions of her external surroundings. In the second chapter I look at long poems by James Merrill to show how descriptions of memories dramatize the shift to self-conscious interrogation of the speaker's ability to remember. In the third chapter, I discuss how, in Meadowlands, Louise Gl|ck disperses intimate moments across multiple speakers who are juxtaposed across two allegorically-linked narratives - the mythological story of The Odyssey and the story of a contemporary marriage's dissolution. In the final chapter, I examine how Claudia Rankine foregrounds use of a lyric "you" instead of a lyric "I" in Citizen to disrupt the assumed universality of the white confessional lyric speaker, in turn destabilizing the assumed correlation between poet and poetic speaker in confessional poetry"--Pages viii-ix.