To a Daughter Leaving Home

Despite having been born in the thirties, Linda Pastan’s timeline and scope can be described most accurately as late Modern or even Post-Confessional. Having delayed the start of her writing career in order to raise children and run the household while her husband attended medical school, Pastan has more in common with a later generation of writers, the second wave of Confessional poets like Sharon Olds, Edward Hirsch, Marie Howe, and Maxine Kumin. Many of these poets adopted themes, motifs, and personal perspectives of poets like Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, and other poets generally called “Confessional.” Pastan finds her subjects in personal, domestic settings associated with Confessional poetics: the household, family relationships, everyday concerns. She too embraces emotionally complex situations, such as the speaker’s deeply mixed feelings in “To a Daughter Leaving Home.” In this poem, a poignant personal exchange represents a more universal transfer of power from one generation of women to the next; Pastan here takes the raw emotional vulnerability of Confessional poetry and elevates its use. The poem moves beyond the internally therapeutic nature of Confessionalism, inviting solidarity and understanding from readers for whom the poem’s metaphor of freedom resonates in broader ways.