The confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s pioneered a type of writing that forever changed the landscape of American poetry. The tradition of confessional poetry has been a major influence on generations of writers and continues to this day. Marie Howe and Sharon Olds are two contemporary poets whose writing largely draws upon their personal experience. The confessionlism has brought into greater self-awareness about and thematization of the interplay between poetry and the world, and an acute self-consciousness about what Wallace Stevens calls the "world of words" we live in. Modem poetry is marked by a constant struggle with the paradoxes of living in, with and through words. Writers have been faced with the recognition that the medium of language is always inescapable yet forever insufficient mode of expression, and many have considered the possibility that ourselves and our world(s) only exist as they are constructed in language. Keywords: Stream of consciousness, Modernism, Confessional poetry.