Anne Sexton’s poems have long been judged for the author’s seeming obsession with the first-person, self-centered account. For one, this judgment is grounded in scholarly bias against literary lyrics with autobiographical impulse, according to which self-referential moments in literature constitute a sign of unpleasant egocentrism.[1] At the center of this discourse, confessional poetry is subject to more layers of critical bias because of its intensive emphasis on the private episodes and autobiographical experiences of the author. This trend of criticism recognizes a bold indulgence with personal matters in confessional poetry as an indication of sentimental banality, which renders Sexton’s raw expressions of private life as an inferior form of art.[2] But more importantly, underneath the unfair accusations of lyric verse with autobiographical impetus lies sexism against female confessional poets. This gendered criticism towards autobiographical lyrics can be uncovered by comparing the ways in which different founding members of the Confessional movement receive contrasting critical assessments as each author launches a new style of poetic writing.
Confessional poetry first emerged with the publication of Life Studies (1959) by Robert Lowell. Lowell’s unflinching exposure of his private life, especially the troubled relationship with his family and the struggle with his own mental health, makes a significant marker of change in the modern American poetic tradition—a shift which launched what M. L. Rosenthal calls “Poetry as Confession” (109).[3] It is well known that Lowell’s confession in Life Studies is met with favorable responses from his contemporary writers and critics alike. Here, I would like to point out that the positive appraisal surrounding Life Studies underlies prejudice against confessional poetry—and by extension, autobiographical literature in general. For instance, Rosenthal’s pioneering assessments of Life Studies demonstrate his initial distaste for Lowell’s display of egocentrism in the book:
It will be clear that my first impressions while reading Life Studies was that it is impure art, magnificently stated but unpleasantly egocentric . . . Life Studies is not merely a collection of small movement-by-movement victories over hysteria and self-concealment. It is also a beautifully articulated poetic sequence . . . The poems that make up the opening movement are not personal in the sense of the rest of the book. They are poems of violent contradiction, historical overture to define the disintegration of a world. (110)
In his effort to reevaluate the book, Rosenthal draws a firm boundary between Life Studies and other art forms which he sees as “impure art,” in other words, the kind of art muddled with trivial personal details. According to Rosenthal, Life Studies successfully separates itself from “a [mere] collection of small movement-by-movement victories” (110). With this distinction, Rosenthal understates the value of a modest retelling of a plain life. Moreover, Rosenthal implies that the openings of Life Studies have great literary value because they constitute a “historical” introduction of a disintegrating world, rather than a bare prelude to a private record.[4] Rosenthal’s resistance to equating Life Studies with what he calls “impure art” is echoed in Troy Jollimore’s analysis of “Skunk Hour,” which is published as an official guide to Lowell’s works in Poetry Foundation online archives. Jollimore’s assessment clearly demonstrates the critical insistence on separating Life Studies from confessional poetry, as Jollimore writes how Lowell is different from other confessional poets, whom he negatively clumps together as a “so-called” group of poets.[5] As such, the early scholarship surrounding Lowell’s confession endeavors to separate Lowell’s Life Studies from other confessional poems, insofar as Lowell’s confession is not simply an autobiographical record but a “historical” statement.
While Lowell’s poetry is recognized for its full worth of originality, Sexton’s confessions are not acknowledged as original or equal in worth by the critics of the time. This unfair treatment is especially evident in James Dickey’s notoriously offensive review of Sexton’s poems. As a fellow writer who was later appointed as the eighteenth United States Poet Laureate, Dickey often pairs Lowell with Sexton in a way that diminishes the value of Sexton’s works. On the publication of Sexton’s To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Dickey writes that “one feels tempted to drop [Sexton’s poems] furtively into the trashcan, rather than be caught with them in the presence of such naked suffering” (63). Indeed, Dickey’s criticism culminates in his interview with Franklin Ashely:
Lowell is a fine poet. He’s a narrow, tragic, personal, confessional kind of writer. He’s very good . . . In order to read Lowell and to like Lowell or Anne Sexton or any of the people that follow after Lowell, what is presupposed is that their life and their situation is going to be eternally fascinating to you. And it isn’t . . . Of course, Lowell is an enormously powerful writer . . . [A]nd he compels you to be interested. People like Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton just embarrass you.
Dickey’s criticism is aligned with the earlier critical tendencies demonstrated by Rosenthal and Jollimore, insofar as Dickey also sets apart Lowell’s confessional works from the poems by the rest of the confessional poets. Although Dickey shows his deprecation of confessional poetry in general, he expresses explicitly that he does not intend to diminish Lowell’s literary talent; in Dickey’s words, Lowell is “a fine poet” and “an enormously powerful writer.” Notably, Dickey calls Lowell a confessional “kind of” writer rather than a confessional writer—an indication of Dickey’s refusal to identify Lowell as a confessional poet in the first place. Furthermore, whereas Lowell is termed according to his profession as a “poet” or a “writer,” Sexton is acknowledged by her career but instead is lumped together as unmarked “people”: “People like Sylvia Plath or Anne Sexton” and “any of the people that followed after Lowell.”
Unfortunately, this kind of vitriolic review by Dickey—and the sexist distinction between Lowell and Sexton—has been one of the most frequently cited criticisms in the scholarship surrounding Sexton’s oeuvre. Towards this long history of scholarly hostility, Gillian White aptly points out the presence of anxiety over advocating for Sexton’s poems within academia as she interprets the element of shame in Sexton’s confessions. According to White, Sexton is “everybody’s least beloved lyric poet,” to which she admits that she, too, feels afraid of being “accused of having no taste” if she identifies with Sexton (98-99).[6] While White explains this question of “taste” in the context of New Criticism, I would like to argue that this particular critical anxiety over “taste” is a matter of ideology—gender politics specifically—rather than subjective preference. Having a taste for so-called high art, replete with elegance and nuances, creates a distance from certain social classes with predispositions to low art—the kind of art boiled over unpleasant, raw, unpurified, and unfiltered egocentrism. Thus, the critical construction of a distinction in literature between the pure and the impure, or the high and the low, in judging Sexton’s poems, are products of politics.[7] The differing scholarly receptions of Life Studies and of To Bedlam and Part Way Back showcase that gendered aesthetic preferences dominate literary criticism.
Granted, not all early scholars of confessional poetry display unfair attitudes against the female confessional poets. Deborah Nelson’s seminal work, which defends the eminence of autobiographical voice in poetry, especially when spoken by women writers, unrecognized and underrated in critical discourse, should not be clumped together with the rough rubric of early schools of hostile criticism regarding the notion of private confession. As Nelson explains how the doctor/patient relationship in Roe v. Wade has already been imagined in women writers’ confessional poetry, she states that Sexton enables “a confession that through its own multiplication offered the privacy not available in silence” (117). Nelson’s concept of self as she evaluates how confessional poetry shifts personal matters into the realm of the public has propelled successive generations of recent scholars to defy the idea of a solipsistic speaker who seems to be speaking all for herself in Sexton’s poetry. Considering Sexton’s confession as a dialogue between the subject and the implied reader, Jo Gill argues that the reciprocity between the speaker and the audience revealed in the text anticipates the emergence of self-reflexivity in American poetry (62-68). Similarly, White suggests that Sexton’s experimentation with intersubjectivity, which often manifests itself in the form of the responsive “you,” reflects the late 1970s avant-garde projects in their refusal of “emblems of heroic and transcendent isolation” (103).
Following this line of critical conversation, I ask for a renewed focus on the second-person pronoun “you” which marks a strong presence throughout Sexton’s works. Although the first-person pronoun “I” heavily inhabits Sexton’s verse since her confessional poems primarily engage with her own private life, I would like to point out that the second-person pronoun “you” makes notably frequent appearances in the text as well. Sexton employs many remarkable literary tropes in her confessions, such as dramatic or epistolary monologue; and among them, summoning the second person into the text effectively demonstrates her yearning to break off from the sole, isolated self and to merge with other people. For that reason, retrieving the second person pronoun in Sexton’s poems is openly at variance with the conventional critical view that the private first-person voice in confessional poetry is, to borrow Rosenthal’s words, “unpleasantly egocentric.”
The liminal space between the first person and the second person in Sexton’s confessions often creates room for intimacy, which I emphasize is not always a harmonious or affectionate alliance, but rather a terrorizing and destructive relation. Regarding the concept of intimacy in Sexton’s confessions, Alicia Ostriker discusses the complexity of the relationship between the poet and the reader based on the idea of seduction. Sexton’s “seductive poetics” closely mirrors the intricate, perplexing, and even enigmatic aspects of passionate relationships among intimates as Ostriker writes:
More powerfully than any other poet in English (only D. H. Lawrence comes close), [Sexton] renders the complexity of intimate relationships—the way they involve the desire to merge with the other and the desire to resist merger; the way the other can be seen both as antagonist and as lover-beloved; the way joy, sympathy, affection, admiration, resentment, fear, anger, and guilt may (must?) coexist at any moment in a relationship of sufficient nearness and dearness. (161)
The charm of Sexton’s confessions is that they encapsulate the complicated ways in which people in any close relationship go through a multitude of feelings, many of which conflict with one another. The readers of Sexton’s poems get involved in the specific contexts described in the texts as they are called on to be present, during which time the poetic texts create plentiful interpretations because of the various effects the second pronoun “you” exudes. As Ostriker argues, the readers may undergo several different emotional episodes because they may fluctuate in “identifying [and] resisting identification with both the ‘I’ and the ‘you’ of the poet’s text,” which is a complex psychological response that closely resembles those felt by people in intimate relationships (161). One crucial theme in Sexton’s poems is a relentless illustration of the overwhelmingly confusing aspects of intimacy in its raw, muddled state. The poem “Loving the Killer,” for example, showcases the ways in which the contradicting impulses of violence and affection revolve around people in close relationships. Describing the aftermath of a recent trip to African nations, the speaker “I” of the poem confesses her bewildering thoughts about the practice of hunting she encountered during this trip. The final stanza establishes the strong kinship between killing and love:
And tonight our skins, our bones,
that have survived our fathers,
will meet, delicate in the hold,
fastened together in an intricate
lock. Then one of us will shout,
“My need is more desperate!” and
I will eat you slowly with kisses
even though the killer in you
has gotten out. (187)
The stanza characterizes the “you” as the speaker’s comrade, whose flesh-and-blood body has “survived [their] fathers” together. Their bond is as physical and visceral (“our skins, our bones”) as it is fragile and intertwined (“delicate in the hold, / fastened together”). The text reveals the contradiction of having the opposite impulses to merge with each other and to fight the merger at the same time. On the one hand, the “you” and the “I” are referenced together as the first-person plural pronoun’s possessive determiner, “our,” denoting the unity of the two people. On the other hand, the two undertake a sudden split; one of them screams “My need is more desperate!” emphasizing the first-person singularness, “my,” at which point the tone of the poem becomes volatile. In the last three lines of the poem, kissing is characterized as an act of eating a person, rather than the touching of lips. Thus, the conventional meaning of kissing as a sign of affection takes on a disconcerting aspect of violence—chewing the body and swallowing it so the other being is consumed. With this unsettling rupture in the text, the relationship between the “I” and the “you”—and the deeply erotic gesture of slow kissing—is thrown into a state of ferocity.
As a manifestation of the jarring complexity involved in intimate relationships, “Loving the Killer” makes a striking example of a bold confession in which the speaker admits her most despicable inner thoughts and actions. The speaker “I” emphasizes how her love necessitates the killing of the innocent beings and the consumption of their flesh, although she “never touched a rifle” and “only carried a camera” herself (186). Her love is a ferocious force that comes only “after the gun, / after the kill, / after the martinis and / the eating of the kill” and is also a callous reckoning that considers the pain and agony of other beings as an aesthetically exotic scene of an oil painting “deep in the bush of Tanzania” (186). As the speaker returns home with the crates of trophies full of skins, skulls, and bones, the poem culminates in the audacious confession, which includes the speaker’s admission of guilt:
Bones piled up like coal, animal bones
shaped like golf balls, school pencils,
fingers and noses. Oh my Nazi,
with your S.S. sky-blue eye—
I am no different from Emily Goering.
Emily Goering recently said she
thought the concentration camps
were for the re-education of Jews
and Communists. She thought! (187)
At this textual moment, the speaker and her partner are characterized as the Nazi members of the Third Reich. Specifically, her partner, addressed as the second-person pronoun’s possessive determiner “your,” is identified as a member of Schutzstaffel, corps of Nazi Party, with a “sky-blue eye,” which is one of the physical traits associated with the Aryan race. At the same time, the speaker is “no different from Emily Goering,” a German actor who served as Adolf Hitler’s hostess, whose later title is known to be the First Lady of the Third Reich. This bold confession renders both the speaker and the partner fragile and precarious as they are now open to shame, humiliation, and condemnation. Importantly, the pronouns of the poem reveal that their vulnerable personhoods are constructed in terms of their relations to each other. The identity of the partner is formulated as the speaker’s Nazi (“my Nazi”), rather than as a Nazi as a generality. Likewise, the speaker’s identity as Emily Goering is constructed through the eyes of her partner (“with your S.S. sky-blue eye— / I am no different from Emily Goering”). This compelling use of the pronouns suggests that the poem is not a confession about one’s sole identity, but rather about identity through alterity, as the text serves as an unflinching admission of how the speaker comes to be who she is in relation to her partner. That is, the speaker’s confession, outlined by an array of pronouns, emerges across intricate matrices of human relations.
In the confession made in “Loving the Killer,” the speaker’s guilt is tied to the guilt of her partner. The abject selfhood that the speaker is deeply ashamed of—a person no different from Emily Goering—is acknowledged by, and admitted through, the eye of her partner, whose selfhood is also equally deplorable—a genocidal murderer like a Schutzstaffel member. As such, their personhoods are relational to such an extent that their “skins, [their] bones, / . . . / [are] fastened together in an intricate / lock” (188). Here, the construction of the speaker’s selfhood ensues from looking through the “eyes” of her partner. That is, the formation of the self takes on a mediated route through the lens of someone else. The importance of the gaze in forming a relationship with other beings has been theorized by various thinkers and philosophers, including Jacques Derrida. In ruminating about an autobiographical subject, Derrida discusses the primal moment in which he recognizes himself naked and feeling ashamed in front of the insistent gaze of his cat. To Derrida, his cat is a specific cat, not “the figure of a cat” nor “an allegory for all the cats on the earth” but a singularity and absolute alterity (6). With his cat staring at his naked body, Derrida discusses the extraordinary experience of being gazed upon by the eyes of the radical other in an abyss of non-comprehension. Likewise, the “I” in Sexton’s confession is gazed upon by the unyielding eye of the “you,” who is a particular and irreducible other. Sexton’s work reminds us that the speaker’s personhood is not shaped by the solitary cognition of oneself, but rather is accrued, managed, and negotiated by the eyes of the all-too-present second person upon the speaker. Thus, the “you” in Sexton’s poems is not a literary trope merely employed for the sake of enhancing the speaker’s monologue. The presence of the “you” enables the admission of the speaker’s wild array of thoughts, emotions, and actions, a process during which the “I” and the “you” become implicated by each other’s complex sets of identification.
Sometimes, a title, an epigraph, or a line from Sexton’s poem clearly states the name of the person the text is written for, and thus the identity of the person referred to as “you” is clearly known. Some examples include “Double Image,” in which the “you” in the poem refers to Sexton’s second child, Joyce; “With Mercy for the Greedy,” in which Ruth, Sexton’s friend, whose name is stated in the epigraph, corresponds to the “you” in the poem; and “In Celebration of My Uterus,” in which the “you” is a not a person but a non-human object, her own uterus. But this expressed reference does not necessarily fix the identity of the addressee, nor does it dictate readers as to how one should interpret the text, as is the case in “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further.” The title states that the poem is written for John; and the biographical evidence suggests that the addressed person is John Holmes—Sexton’s teacher at Tufts University, who discouraged her from using mental illness as a subject matter of her poems. In that regard, the poem might be read as the poet’s private response sent to her mentor in real life. However, aside from the lone title, the text itself reveals little to none about the verifiable history such as the nature of the relationship between Sexton and Holmes. Furthermore, even if the reader has had full access to the poet’s biographical background in reading the poem, obscurity governs the entire text so much so that the suggested identity of the addressee in the title is not conducive to understanding the text in a meaningful way. The poem begins with a series of allusive lines that hint at the speaker’s reflective thoughts about a certain place:
Not that it was beautiful
But that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum
where the cracked mirror
or my own selfish death
outstared me. (34)
Notably, the grammatical structures of the first few lines refuse to provide clarity about what the speaker precisely means. For example, the fifth and the sixth lines list two completely different things (“that narrow diary of my mind” and “the commonplaces of the asylum”) when these lines are supposed to elucidate the nature of the place (“there”). Furthermore, the description of the nature of the “asylum” is, again, expressed via the coordinating conjunction or, joining multiple ideas and making the meaning ambiguous as to exactly what the speaker intends to say. This obscurity in denotation carries on the fluid use of the pronoun in the text. Once the speaker builds intimacy with the addressed “you” by admitting that she is sharing “something” inside of herself (34), the confession that follows rapidly unravels:
I tapped my own head;
it was a glass, an inverted bowl.
It is a small thing
to rage in your own bowl.
At first it was private.
Then it was more than myself;
it was you, or your house
or your kitchen. (34)
In the above confession, it is not certain what the third person pronoun “it” refers to. On the one hand, “it” seems to point to the speaker’s own head, which is also described as some type of bowl made of glass. In the following verse, though, the thing that was private at first, which is again vaguely phrased as “it,” alludes to something else—suddenly adverting itself to “you, or your house / or your kitchen.” Here, the conjunction or either functions to link alternatives, in which case “you,” “your house,” and “your kitchen” constitute a list of different candidates for what the pronoun “it” refers to; or the conjunction or serves to introduce a synonym, making the three listed items one cluster of single categories, in which scenario “you” becomes de-personified into a house and a kitchen. In these confusing shifts in identification, the ambiguity in the use of the pronoun does not get resolved but rather comes to a climax in the final two lines: “my kitchen, your kitchen, / my face, your face” (35).
According to White, Sexton’s multivalent voices, manifested in confessions such as “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further,” push us to think about “how, on what terms, readers identify (with) poems, their speaking subjects, and their authors” (145). I agree that Sexton’s poems allow readers to have a wild array of interpretations, especially about who is being summoned by the calling of the “you.” As a result, it is debatable as to what kind of effect—intimate, alienating, or a complex mixture of the two—the use of the second-person pronoun provokes in Sexton’s confession. In many cases, the pronoun “you” dominates the text that the second person voice guides Sexton’s confession rather than the first person “I.” In the poem “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further,” I would suggest that the consistent exchange between the first person and the second person pronouns indicates that the “I” and the “you” are fastened hard together, so much so that the speaker’s ontological status (as “my” head raging inside “your” head) as well as her epistemological knowledge (as “my” finding—phrased as “something”—is to share with “you”) are only formulated in relation to the addressed “you.” In other words, even when the speaker may seem to be absorbed in herself only, the verse subtly reveals her desire to merge with, and potentially care for, the other.
In particular, the use of the second-person pronoun “you” suits the public oral citation aspects of Sexton’s poetry readings, which were always enormously popular. In performing her poems out loud, Sexton even mobilized a literary rock band Her Kind, which was named after her poem.[8] As Jacqueline Rose points out, Sexton is a “performance artist of intimacy,” a talented writer versatile in drawing emphatic emotional response from the audience (17). Lowell, too, remarks that “[a]t a time when poetry readings were expected to be boring, no one ever fell asleep at Anne’s” (71). In fact, Christopher Grobe argues that confessional poetry is inherently a “performance genre, infused, at every stage of its creation and dissemination, with the synthetic ‘breath’ of embodied orality” (216). By this radical claim, Grobe emphasizes the physical presence of the poet on the stage and the live energy it brings to the audience as an effect. For Sexton, poems are a textual space in which she connects with readers through sharing the most private details of her life. Poetry reading amplifies this effect by staging the reading performance in a public setting.[9] Each time Sexton delivers a reading in a live setting, her performances inevitably vary—sometimes subtly, at times dramatically—as she stresses different parts of the words or lines; as she makes alterations in pronunciation; as she changes her intonations; as she bends the pitch in her voice at different stoppages; and as she sheds tears during the reading and needs to take time to compose herself.[10] Sexton’s reading triggers a chain of live reactions from the audience, such as heartful cheering in response to her crying, which in turn affects her reading, so the whole production of the performance operates on the principles of reciprocal communication between the poet and the audience. The nonverbal interaction between the poet and the audience, as well as the impromptu physical gestures shared between the two parties, are all part of the reading performance, none of which are inscribed or recorded on the page of the text. As such, Sexton’s reading is improvisational by nature, and it is always aware of, and demands, the presence of the audience. Without the audience, who is often addressed as the second person pronoun in and out of the poems, Sexton’s reading cannot exist. Thus, Sexton’s confession, as it is often shared in the form of a collective reading experience with the audience, shakes the rigid boundary between the private and the public, and the print page and the live performance.
Sexton’s confession constitutes an epistemological embrace in which the “I” and the “you” see themselves in their all-too-human forms—diminished, compromised, and vulnerable, as they are stripped off naked by the unblushing confession. Sexton’s poems do not merely account for an isolated life of her own, but in addition, they engage with archives of memories with others, whom Sexton repeatedly conjures up in the form of the “you” throughout her confession. The confessional self in Sexton’s poetry, therefore, cancels the illusion that the subject forged in autobiographical literature is a singular, separate, sovereign being whose actions are solely motivated by self-interest, self-consciousness, and self-knowledge. The first person and the second person imagined in Sexton’s confession are not autonomous subjects, but rather they are fragmented, fragile, and dependent beings in a relationship who are open to pain and humiliation. Sexton’s engagement with autobiographical poetics augments this process of formulating a self in relation, because language itself in poetry undergoes a process of undoing. As Ulla E. Dydo explains, with poetry, “one is never comfortably at home,” because reading the lines of a poem is “like reading naked words, stripped of the ‘encrusted surfaces’ that habit has led us to expect and to recognize without the effort of thought” (7-8). With the procession of the stanzas through which a sentence carries on without pause beyond each stanza’s end and into the next, the meanings of the poet’s words run over from one stanza to the next, never reaching a conclusion until terminal punctuation. The construction of the vulnerable selves in Sexton’s confession—the first person in relation to, and dependent upon, the second person—is never end-stopped, since their autobiographical selfhoods are constantly undone, negotiated, and reoriented as moving through the fragments and ruptures in poetry.
Works Cited
Ashley, Franklin. “James Dickey, The Art of Poetry No. 20.” The Paris Review 65, 1976,
https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/3741/the-art-of-poetry-no-20-james-dickey.
Bishop, Elizabeth, and Robert Lowell. Words in Air: The Complete Correspondence between Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell. Ed. Thomas Travisano and Saskia Hamilton. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008.
Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. 1979. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.
Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. New York: Fordham UP, 2008.
Dickey, James. “Review of To Bedlam and Part Way Back.” Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale. Ed. Steven E. Colburn. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1988.
Dydo, Ulla E. ““Stanzas in Meditation”: The Other Autobiography.” Chicago Review 35.2 (1985): 4-20.
Gill, Jo. “Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton’s Early Poetry.” Twentieth Century Literature 50.1 (2004): 59-87.
Gill, Jo, and Melanie Waters. “Poetry and Autobiography.” Life Writing 6.1 (2009): 1-9.
Grobe, Christopher. “The Breath of the Poem: Confessional Print/Performance circa 1959.” PMLA 127.2 (2012): 215-30.
Görbert, Johannes, Marie Lindskov Hansen, and Jeffrey Charles Wolf. “The Self in Verse. Exploring Autobiographical Poetry.” The European Journal of Life Writing 10 (2021): 1-12.
Jollimore, Troy. “Skunk Hour. Witnessing the Making of a New American Poetics.” Poetry Foundation 16, Aug. 2007,
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68912/robert-lowell-skunk-hour.
Lejeune, Philippe. On Autobiography. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1989.
Lowell, Robert. “Anne Sexton.” Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics. Ed. J. D. McClatchy. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1978.
Nelson, Deborah. Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2002.
Ostriker, Alicia. “Anne Sexton and the Seduction of the Audience.” Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric. Ed. Dianne Hunter. Champaign, IL: U of Illinois P, 1989, pp. 154-69.
Rose, Jacqueline. On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World. London: Chatto and Windus, 2003.
Rosenthal, M. L. Our Life in Poetry: Selected Essays and Reviews. New York: Persea Books, 1991.
Sexton, Anne. Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. Ed. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1988.
Vendler, Helen. “Malevolent Flippancy.” The New Republic 185.19 (1981): 33-35.
White, Gillian, Lyric Shame: The “Lyric” Subject of Contemporary American Poetry. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014.
Recuperating the Second Person Pronoun in Confessional Poetry
Abstract
Sexton’s confessional poems have long been judged for the author’s seeming obsession with presenting a self-centered account. Against critical accusations that confessional poetry is unpleasantly egocentric, I highlight the strong presence of the second person pronoun “you” in Sexton’s confession, which evidences the author’s desire to merge with others. In Sexton’s poems, the speaker’s personhood is accrued, managed, and negotiated by the eyes of an all-too-present second person. As such, the “you” enables the admission of the speaker’s guilt, a process during which the “I” and the “you” become implicated by each other’s complex sets of identification. Also, the obscurity in denotation in the pronouns indicates that the “I” and the “you” are fastened together, so much so that the speaker can only be formulated in relation to the addressed “you.” As is often shared in the form of a collective reading experience with the audience, Sexton’s confession shakes the rigid boundary between the “I” and the “you,” the private and the public, and the print page and the live performance. Sexton’s extraordinary construction of personhood reminds us that the first person as well as the second person imagined in her confession are not isolated subjects, but rather are vulnerable, dependent beings in a relationship who are open to pain and humiliation.
Key Words
Confessional Poetry, Anne Sexton, Pronouns, You, Autobiography
논문 투고 일자: 2023. 11. 4.
심사 완료 일자: 2023. 11. 27.
게재 확정 일자: 2023. 12. 4.
윤지현
고려대학교 영어영문학과 강사
[1] As Johannes Görbert et al point out, the scholarly approaches to self-expression in poetry are still at an emergent stage (3). One way to explain the inattention to autobiographical poetry is that prose, rather than poetry, has long been the focus of studies in autobiographical writing. When autobiography is merged with poetry, the mix of these two literary forms invites a protracted controversy because many scholars in studies of autobiography have a fluid understanding of the term autobiography as a genre or as a mode (Jo Gill and Melanie Waters 1). Autobiography is first recognized and theorized as a prose narrative, which is evidenced in Philippe Lejeune’s seminal definition of the main form of language in autobiography as either narrative or prose (4). And up to the present time, autobiography is still commonly associated with prose text. Thus, the association of autobiography with poetry is a relatively unusual literary phenomenon, and the mix of these two genres is often met with suspicion. For more, see James Olney’s notion of poetic-autobiographic metaphor in Metaphors of Self: The Meaning of Autobiography (Princeton UP, 1972), 45.
[2] For instance, Helen Vendler does not approve of Sexton’s “taboo-breaking” as a proper poetic task since poems, according to Vendler, cannot be “improved by having a shattered taboo in it” (33). Elizabeth Bishop also expresses her unease with Sexton’s bold confession in a subtle manner. As a poet whose style of writing is characterized by its reticence, Bishop states in her correspondence that she feels as if she comes to know “too much” about Sexton after having read Sexton’s confessional poems (327).
[3] By this phrase, which prompted the name of the school of Confessional Poetry, Rosenthal means the use of poetry as “soul’s therapy . . . for the most naked kind of confession,” in which the speaker of the poems in Life Studies is “unequivocally [Lowell] himself” (109).
[4] This critical resistance to an ordinary and personal form of storytelling explains why “Skunk Hour”—the least confessional among many verses and prose passages in Life Studies—enjoys the most scholarly attention. For example, Rosenthal’s analysis of the poem reads as follows: “‘Skunk Hour,’ full of indirectness and nuances that bring the sickness of our world as a whole back into the scene to restore a more universal vision, reaches a climax of self-contempt and of pure symbol-making” (112). Here, the poem receives favorable attention for its vision of universality and its quest for pure symbol. The expressed appreciation for the “indirectness and nuances” of the poem also shows the critical predilection for subtlety in the author’s tone and attitude, as opposed to the author’s bold exposure of private feelings. As such, the poem’s stark contrast to a plain and personal ordinariness brings it its honor as an epochal art form.
[5] For more, see
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/68912/robert-lowell-skunk-hour.
In Jollimore’s terms, the “perpetual, irresolvable tension” between the need to reveal and the need to conceal informs the tension within the critical discourse surrounding Life Studies regarding Lowell’s audacious crossing of the line between concealing of the private and revealing of the public.
[6] According to White, even Sexton’s passionate fans such as J. D. McClatchy, tend to qualify their interest in their critical works on Sexton (295). For more, see J. D. McClatchy’s introduction to Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics (Indiana UP, 1978), viii.
[7] Taste in aesthetic patterns, according to Pierre Bourdieu, is not merely an individual preference but a cultural capital: “[s]ocial subjects, classified by their classifications, distinguish themselves by the distinctions they make, between the beautiful and the ugly, the distinguished and the vulgar, in which their position in the objective classifications is expressed or betrayed” (6).
[8] The sound recordings of Anne Sexton and Her Kind are available in The Woodberry Poetry Room’s collection at Harvard University. The collection includes Sexton’s live performances as well as the rehearsals and sessions in studio. For more, visit https://library.harvard.edu/collections/anne-sexton-and-her-kind-sound-recordings-1968-1971.
[9] Sexton comments on “Some Foreign Letters” (1962) that the “final test of a poem often comes during a public reading” (17). For more, see Sexton’s No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose (U of Michigan P, 1985), 14-17.
[10] For more, see Victoria Van Hyning’s study on Sexton’s live recordings, especially the versions of the poem “The Reading” (including the earlier draft, the manuscript, and the printed version) in This Business of Words: Reassessing Anne Sexton (UP of Florida, 2016), 104-26.
영미문학연구
Journal of English Studies in Korea
46 (2024): 24-26
영미문학연구회 블로그 
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