Serious daring: Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton

In discussing herself as a source of influence upon her fellow Confessional poets, Anne Sexton claimed to have given "a sort of daring" to Sylvia Plath. My question is not only whether that gift of daring was Sexton's to give to Plath, but what the nature of poetic "daring" was as she perceived it, in saying it had been given. When criticism says, as it does repeatedly, that Plath and Sexton were "daring," "bold," "rebellious," "courageous," and "striking," the inference is that they transgressed poetic and social norms, (particularly gender-based norms) but how and why and towards what end?;I explore the very different ways in which Plath and Sexton attempted to answer Prufrock's question ("Do I dare/Disturb the universe?") in the affirmative, although both of their responses were, in effect, ambivalent, and less then resoundingly in favor of the value of conventional notions of poetic "daring" as they had been established after Modernism. I discuss the conditions under which Sexton developed her ideas about the "daring" she saw herself as having given to Plath, and how such daring related to the concern about "truth" so central to the Confessional enterprise. Succeeding chapters deal with the ways in which Plath constructs a sense of daring as form of moral growth, and the ways in which Sexton sought to justify her daring by framing it within a class-based tradition, despite her ostensible rejection of such a tradition as inimical to specifically feminist strategies of daring. Finally, I consider the question of how successful Plath and Sexton were in terms of integrating visionary and visual experience, given the very different goals to which their respective strategies of poetic daring are directed.