| This dissertation examines each of the volumes in Anne Sexton's Complete Poems. I attempt to identify Sexton's work with Confession and autobiography as a sustained feminist project. The Confessional voice, I maintain, offered Sexton a way of inscribing her subjectivity, as a woman, within her work. I locate each of Sexton's collections within a wide range of social, critical, popular/literary, and political contexts. Methodologically, this dissertation proceeds and departs from the extant Sexton scholarship; it offers a thorough contextual examination of the Complete Poems and suggests, in relation to the poems, a great many literary influences and analogues.;I locate the Confessional Group (in Chapter One), drawing from the existing criticism, and both confirm and trouble the notion of a knowable Confessional school; central to this discussion is my assertion that the ambitions of the male and female Confessional poets both intersect and differ (a concept which is rarely, if ever, addressed in critical readings of Confession). Chapters Two and Three examine Sexton's work (in To Bedlam and Part Way Back , All My Pretty Ones, and Live or Die) with Confessional themes---suicide, mental illness and despair---themes which are strategically gendered in her poems.;Chapters Four, Five, and Six trace Sexton's movement, in her writing, away from Confessional poetry, a movement which enabled her to expand her thematic range, compound her personal voice, and abandon the traditional Confessional themes. The female body/erotic bliss, fairy tales, and biblical themes are investigated, respectively, in my examination of Love Poems, Transformations, The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks and The Awful Rowing Poems, Transformations, The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks and The Awful Rowing Toward God. Sexton's work in these, and all of her collections, is highly gynocentric, providing critical discourse on female representation and experience.;In the Conclusion, I raise questions about the editing of Sexton's posthumous collections (collections she had not completed at the time of her death in 1974), and suggest that a discussion of this poetry would be more appropriate to a biographical study than a critical study, given the incomplete, harrowing nature of these poems. |
