Anne Sexton Confessional Poetry Analysis

While the poems focus on love they also reveal the role of women in a sense of what was and was not acceptable in the ancient days. She emphasizes the importance and power of love through people and actions. The way she sees love is quite different than what most people would think. In other words it is not necessarily affectionate. Her poems tell us how love comes with many consequences, sadness, depression, anger, and even how love is lost.

Anne Sexton was a poet and a woman, but most importantly, she was an outcast. Subjected to nervous breakdowns and admitted to a neuropsychiatry hospital, Sexton must have been all too familiar with the staring eyes and the judging minds of the public. Just being a woman in today's world often can be enough to degrade a person in the public's eye, let alone being labeled as a crazy woman. But Anne Sexton did not let society remain unchallenged in its views. She voiced a different opinion of women through poetry. In Anne Sexton's "Her Kind" the speaker of the poem embraces society's negative stereotype of modern, liberated women and transforms it into a positive image. Two voices, the voice of

But, we cannot forget about the tone that Marisa was getting out. She understands as a woman what it is like to be young and feel like nothing is pretty enough for the world we live in. So the tone set in this poem demonstrates understanding of the difficulties of being a girl in today’s society. She turned a not so perfect dress into one she was proud to wear, which shows courage to change the way we feel about things. Marisa describes that in the future she will meet someone who will see past all the vein things and say, “She is sublime, will be precisely right, and I will step / With incandescent shoulders, into my perfect evening.”

The poem starts with the statement, “a woman who loves a woman is forever young” (Sexton 1-3). These beginning lines set a common theme of eternal youthfulness and lesbian desire. In her introduction, Sexton also plays on the imagery of old versus young in her descriptions of “old breast against young breast”

Throughout the poem the author uses imagery to develop a sense of gentle love, a fondness of the beautiful story of her heritage. Using words such as, “beautiful sisters giggled and danced” and “a lanky girl trailing after her father through his Oklahoma field” and even stating “my sister and I were in love with Meema’s indian blanket.” the author generates imagery of the story she is trying to tell about her family.

She, herself, was neither a visionary nor a mystic poet but was a devoted member of the Church of England. She believed that church was the dwelling place of the spirit of God upon earth and that she owed it all the honour within her bounds (Zaturenska: 233). Much of her devotional work, therefore, was the expression of her own individuality marked with sincerity, fervour and pure devotion. Her poems were an expression of her subjectivity which reflect the surrender of her inner self to her God. In fact, her poems bring into limelight the personal relationship that she shared with God, the relation of complete surrender. She says:

Many great literary and artistic geniuses have been troubled with deep melancholy and phrenic illness. Anne Sexton is an example of a poet with such quandaries who utilized her personal despair to inspire her poetic works. Sexton’s raw material on the inequality of women in a flawed society has sprouted an uproar for change.

Every author, poet, playwright has a subtle message that they would like present to their audience. It may be a lifelong struggle that they have put into words, or a multiple page book that took a lifetime to write. A poet by the name of Anne Sexton sought out to challenge society’s views of women by writing “Her Kind”. A poet, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, Anne Sexton writes about the conflicts of a social outcast living in modern times. She voices the hardships she faces through three different speakers in her poem. At the end of the poem, the woman is not ashamed nor afraid of whom she is and is ready to die in peace. In Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”, the main idea the speaker is depicting is the multiple stereotypes placed on a woman, by society. Sexton’s vivid use of imagery paints a picture of the witch, house wife, and mother cliché, while also implying the poem is autobiographical as Sexton went through her own personal struggles during her life.

Both Judith Wright and Sylvia Plath explore different feminist views in their poetry in order to highlight the freedom that comes with the empowerment of women and the escapement from the boundaries of social expectations. Wright uses stylistic devices such as punctuation, oxymoron, metaphor, and personification to discuss the insecurities she has with her body in her poem ‘Naked Girl and Mirror’. The oxymoron, “I see you are lovely, hateful naked girl”, depicts the internal struggle she deals with that centres on her self-image. The world has metaphorically detached Wright’s mind from her body and this encourages her to write with a more feminist view in order to remind her listeners that she has a soul and her gender is not all she is.

the touchy subjects that she chooses to write on. Many of her works show how she looks, and is

This poem is elegant, graceful, and almost majestic, but there is no denying its serious and subtle severity. The way Plath writes the poem makes it move smoothly and elegantly from line to line, only occasionally revealing x the subtle hints of severity come to a powerful ending. Instead of reading this and automatically feeling the cutting edge it has, it soothes into the root of the problem and by the time it reaches the powerful ending starting with the agitated hands, a rhythm has already been established that was slowly climaxing to this

Poets are influenced by the poetry they read, likewise some of Marie Howe’s poems are like the poems from Anne Sexton who was born and raised in Massachusetts. She committed suicide at 45 which was when Howe was in her early 20s. Howe was born In New York and is still alive today. Both poets made poems about sexual pleasures however Sexton made more poems on love while Howe made reminiscent ones. Sexton’s poems had a figurative language that could be interpreted in many ways that did not have a relationship between each other while Howe had metaphors that were interconnected with different meanings.

There are so many beautiful pieces of poetry that people write to express how they feel and their purpose in the world. Annie Matheson and Emily Dickinson write poetry to explore who they are with words of intelligence. Poetry gives people a way to express themselves with figurative language which Matheson and Dickinson use a lot in their writing. Poems have themes, a tone, characters, irony, symbolism and much more significances to why poems are inspiring. The poems Sleep by Annie Matheson and from X and XXI by Emily Dickinson demonstrates a lot of different figurative language and symbolism that makes these poems so valued.

The last stanza in this poem considers the woman's physical description and moral character. Her “so soft [and] so calm” flow radiates peace and goodness.

Sexton’s “After Auschwitz” and Sachs’ “Chorus of the rescued”, both are two poems written with a 34 year difference about the Holocaust, with the same theme but vastly different subject matter and stances. The reader starts After Auschwitz immediately seeing anger, setting the tone for this poem almost instantly. Unlike the Chorus of the rescue, Sexton’s poem was assertive and aggressive and specifically orients itself with addressing atrocities of which men are capable of and not bashful at all in casting blame, nor in telling the world exactly how man should be condemned. Sexton writes, “Man is evil”(11), “Man is a flower, that should be burnt”(13-14), “Man is a bird full of mud”(16-17). She funnels all of her rage into these lines above,