SOURCE: Mishra, D. S. “The Confessional Mode of Kamala Das: Romanticism and Realism.” Contemporary Indian English Poetry: A Revaluation, edited by Vallabh Vidyanagar, pp. 55-62. India: Sardar Patel University Press, 1990.

In the following essay, Mishra situates Das's poetry in the confessional genre and discusses her attempts to mythologize her personal experiences.

Kamala Das, a recognized feminist poet, writes “autobiographical poems” to “mythologize” her personal life. She expresses her strong feeling of love and admits her inability to realise it in the world of self-centred men. Obviously, her poetry is suffused in emotion. This emotion seems to be a subjective emotion, but it is not so. It is really the psychological consequences of poetic experience and knowledge. Her poetry, therefore, is not merely the confession of “the facts” of her life; it is also the expression of universal truths experienced by an individual soul that longs to be one...