My views on the Confessionals are controversial and I do not expect people necessarily to agree with me. I know many women and feminists admire Plath and Sexton and blame the men in their lives for their suicides and unhappiness (including possibly Lowell, who was their poetry teacher at Boston University).

My view is informed by the fact that Lowell, Plath, and Sexton all had bipolar disorder according to most biographers. As a role model for mentally ill people who want to become writers, I prefer Lowell to Sexton or Plath because I do not feel that his poetry was adversely affected by his illness, at least until he got Lithium for it in the last two years of his life. (After that, he wrote only flat, cryptic, boring sonnets. It does not speak well for Lithium as a drug for creative individuals. But he did stop having manic episodes in which he took up a new woman and then landed in the hospital, leaving both old and new women puzzled, angry, and confused.)

Lowell's personal life has much to criticize, as many here no doubt are aware. He was a bad alcoholic, a womanizer, and possibly an actual perpetrator of domestic violence. My take on Lowell (comes from the Ian Hamilton biography, mostly, which some criticize as the biography of an illness rather than of a poet) is that he also was very ill and out of control in his behavior (even as he was in control of his poetic voice). The poem "Speak of the Woe That is in Marriage" (written from the point of view of an abused wife of an alcoholic) suggests that Lowell understood the effect of his behavior on women and regretted it, but perhaps could not control what he was doing:

It is the future generation that presses into being by means of these exuberant feelings and supersensible soap bubbles of ours. --Schopenhauer

The hot night makes us keep our bedroom windows open.
Our magnolia blossoms. Life begins to happen.
My hopped up husband drops his home disputes,
and hits the streets to cruise for prostitutes,
free-lancing out along the razor's edge.
This screwball might kill his wife, then take the pledge.
Oh the monotonous meanness of his lust. . .
It's the injustice . . . he is so unjust--
whiskey-blind, swaggering home at five.
My only thought is how to keep alive.
What makes him tick? Each night now I tie
ten dollars and his car key to my thigh. . . .
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
he stalls above me like an elephant.

Lowell's poetic style changed greatly from his first great poem, "A Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket":

A brackish reach of shoal off Madaket--
The sea was still breaking violently and night
Had steamed into our North Atlantic Fleet,
When the drowned sailor clutched the drag-net. Light
Flashed from his matted head and marble feet,
He grappled at the net
With the coiled, hurdling muscles of his thighs:
The corpse was bloodless, a botch of reds and whites,
Its open, staring eyes
Were lustreless dead-lights
Or cabin-windows on a stranded hulk
Heavy with sand.......

to the autobiographical poems in "Life Studies" and "For the Union Dead". An example of the free verse, breezy, later style is "Waking in the Blue":

Waking in the Blue

The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.").......

Both in his more formal verse and his freeer verse Lowell is entirely in control of his voice. He was also in control of his role as public poet, teaching many future poets, doing readings, writing articles, etc., even as his personal life spun out of control.

By contrast, Sexton and Plath both wrote (or at least published) poems that would be a lot better were it not for their mania or depression. For example Plath's famous "Daddy" in which she compares her father to a Nazi:

........
I have always been scared of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You--

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that.......

strikes me as overblown and perhaps manic. Her father may have been bad, but he wasn't a Nazi, and it is in poor taste to say he was. (Sharon Olds is guilty of similar poor taste in many poems about her father, and she doesn't have an excuse as far as I know.)

Sexton, on the other hand, is a poor role model for mentally ill poets because she gave dozens of public readings at which she cried because she was so miserably depressed. I don't blame Sexton herself for this (she was trying to do poetry readings for the sake of the poetry and it was not her fault that people came to see the "crazy poet woman" freak out), but I think people surrounding her should have helped her not to read when she was going to make an embarrassing scene. No mentally ill person with poetic aspirations would want Sexton as a model though, given this. People with mental illness work all the time trying not to make public scenes.

Also, Sexton's published work is very uneven, probably because she was encouraged to write as therapy by the psychiatrist she calls "Dr. Y" in her poems. Writing as therapy is inherently incompatible with writing excellent work for publication. Many of Sexton's poems are brilliant, and some are the best evocations of mental illness that I have ever read, but her public humiliation and uneven published output mean that I cannot hold her out to aspiring poets who are mentally ill as an example of how to be a poet who suffers from mental illness.

I do teach Sexton when I do workshops for mentally ill people, though, but as a poet, not as a role model for my students. The "suicides are like carpenters" statement in "Wanting to Die":

Wanting to Die

Since you ask, most days I cannot remember.
I walk in my clothing, unmarked by that voyage.
Then the almost unnameable lust returns.

Even then I have nothing against life.
I know well the grass blades you mention,
the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.
Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
They never ask why build.

Twice I have so simply declared myself,
have possessed the enemy, eaten the enemy,
have taken on his craft, his magic.

In this way, heavy and thoughtful,
warmer than oil or water,
I have rested, drooling at the mouth-hole.

I did not think of my body at needle point.
Even the cornea and the leftover urine were gone.
Suicides have already betrayed the body.

Still-born, they don't always die,
but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet
that even children would look on and smile.

To thrust all that life under your tongue!--
that, all by itself, becomes a passion.
Death's a sad Bone; bruised, you'd say,

and yet she waits for me, year after year,
to so delicately undo an old wound,
to empty my breath from its bad prison.

Balanced there, suicides sometimes meet,
raging at the fruit, a pumped-up moon,
leaving the bread they mistook for a kiss,

leaving the page of the book carelessly open,
something unsaid, the phone off the hook
and the love, whatever it was, an infection.

is one of the most accurate and well-explained texts on suicide that I have ever read (and I have the personal experience to know what Sexton was writing about), and I like the poem as a poem, too. In conclusion, I respect Sexton as a poet, but not as a role model. On the other hand, I find it very hard to like Plath's poems; they seem too histrionic to me. (I would be happy if someone posted a Plath poem that I could like, because I like the idea of Sylvia Plath. I just don't like her actual poetry.) Lowell has always been my hero in my own struggle with poetry and bipolar illness, because he had a full career as poet and professor and published excellent work despite severe illness. I would not envy the women in his life, though; I am sure he treated them very badly.