The Summer I Was Sixteen

“The Summer I Was Sixteen” is situated in a long literary history of confessional poetry—a style of poetry centering the intimate personal world of a speaker who is interchangeable with the poet. Connolly’s poem is specifically concerned with explicating moments from her own childhood as a way of understanding herself and the wider world through the medium of writing, and, while the highly particular autobiographical details of a confessional poem tend not to lend themselves to symbolizing universal realities, “The Summer I was Sixteen” transcends these boundaries with themes like childhood innocence or the feminine experience.

Connolly’s work exists alongside fellow women poets Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, both of whom used poetry to expose the most intimate and oftentimes profoundly vulnerable versions of themselves. Sexton and Plath insisted that the subjects of personal trauma and gender inequality ought to be a concern of poetry; this not only widened the discourse of confessional poetry, but also paved the way for Connolly’s work decades later. Connolly exemplifies the contemporary woman poet, using influences from confessional poetry to discuss modern issues surrounding women’s experiences.