There were however clear moves towards the "confessional" mode before the publication of "Life Studies". Delmore Schwartz's confessional long poem "Genesis" had been published in 1943; and John Berryman had written a sonnet sequence in 1947 about an adulterous affair he'd had with a woman named Chris while he was married to his first wife, Eileen (however, since publishing the sonnets would have revealed the affair to his wife, Berryman didn't actually publish the sequence, titled "Berryman's Sonnets", until 1967, after he divorced from his first wife). Snodgrass' "Heart's Needle", in which he writes about the aftermath of his divorce, also preceded "Life Studies".