'Her kind' and the canon: Anne Sexton's erotic poetry and body politics

As an interpretive biography, " 'Her Kind' and the Canon" offers a reading of the relationship between the body's primacy in Anne Sexton's poetry and the two years she spent as an emerging poet at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. This work first investigates the culture that produced the artist, then examines the imaginative power of her poetry. Just as Whitman in the nineteenth century recentered the cosmos in the eroticized male body, out of the post-W.W.II era's climate of containment Sexton recentered her cosmos in the eroticized female body. Dedicated to battling the hidden dissuaders then preventing women from participating fully in their culture, the Radcliffe Institute introduced Sexton to feminist ideas, and her evocation of the female body underwent change. Whereas the female subjects populating much of her earlier work had remained encumbered by guilt, illness, and other manifestations of the cultural psychosis Sexton tackled, while at the Institute there emerged from her poetry an erotic ancient goddess figure freed from guilt and illness and quite powerful.;Sexton's goddess figure embodies female sexuality, sensuality, and creativity, and it remains a potent presence throughout the remainder of her work. Her later poetry generates with the goddess's libidinal force a poetic space out of which Sexton's female subjects come into a sense of being that breaks from culturally imposed boundaries. On the map of the eroticized female body Sexton explores and explodes notions of gender and modes of being. Upon close study, Sexton's map also leads us back to the lovely little yellow house once known as the Radcliffe Institute, now called the Mary Bunting Institute in honor of its founder. Just as the Institute remains important to women, so too does Sexton's poetic vision. Her body of work marks a moment significant to the evolution of American poetry, a moment that evolves out of the acceptance of distinctly female images and experiences, a moment that points towards what has not yet been accomplished: that time when American women will have achieved full authority over their bodies, when an eroticized female life equals autonomous female empowerment in American culture and literature.