With a 'painter's eye': Anne Sexton's use of negative space

Anne Sexton is a poet who had most of her work published during the 1960s and 1970s, a time in which the poetic community experienced a revival of the confessional genre. This particular revival generated poets, among them Sexton, who focused even more on the Self and strived toward personalization as opposed to universality. Another differentiation, especially in Sexton's works, is the reader's participation in seeing her poems' visual compositions. In Sexton's poems, she creates negative space or gaps. By analyzing the poet's rhythm and imagery using reader-response critical theory, these gaps become evident. Furthermore, by studying the negative spaces and then comparing and contrasting them with the spatial elements in Expressionist and Surrealist paintings, that is, applying Horace's ut pictura poesis dictum, the reader's role in filling, diverging, or dismissing these spaces emerges.