Authors
Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Bibliography
Biography
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Questions for Discussion and Writing
Anne Sexton and John Berryman are key figures in the mode loosely described as "confessional" or "confessionalist"; their poems often present painful personal experience and psychological responses which emanate from and relate chiefly to their private lives. Though both turned away from Emerson's premise of the poet as bard, speaker for a tribe, nation, or "us," Berryman and Sexton were unable to escape being public figures as their mental breakdowns and respective suicides drew attention to them and figured centrally in the commentary about their verse. This commentary often presents them as victims of modernity; much remains to be said about their verse forms and their use of the English language.
1. Review a few of Anne Bradstreet's poems in volume 1 of NAAL: Upon the Burning of Our House, To My Dear and Loving Husband, To Her Father with Some Verses, and the three elegies to her grandchildren. Then read stanzas 19-25 of Berryman's Homage to Mistress Bradstreet. Compare the voices in these poems: Bradstreet's own (public) voice, and Berryman's effort to offer us Bradstreet's private voice. Where is Berryman's language suggestive of Bradstreet's seventeenth-century diction? Where does he use more modern language? Some of the lines in Berryman's poem are complex and difficult to sort out grammatically and syntactically. Why would Berryman use lines of this sort to represent a poet known for the clarity of her own lines?
2. Compare Sexton's Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman (1964) to Berryman's Dream Song 385 (1968). Each poem addresses a member of the speaker's immediate family. Compare the way that these people are presented. If you were the daughter described in either of these poems, how would you feel about the publication of the poem? Here we encounter a complex question regarding confessional poetry and the presentation of living human beings on the printed page. What do you feel about this practice? Where else have you seen it?
3. Is Sexton's Sylvia's Death (1966) more about Sylvia Plath or about Anne Sexton? Which moments or motifs in the poem influence your answer? Compare this poem to other modern American elegies that you have read, by Robert Lowell, Williams, Moore, Roethke, or Hayden. What are some of the key differences between these poems and Sexton's?