A recent trend in the study of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath often dissociates Confessional poetry from the subject of the writer and her biography, claiming that the artist is in full control of her work and that her art does not have naïve mimetic qualities. However, this study proposes that subjective attributes, namely negativity and abjection, enable a powerful transformative dialectic. Specifically, it demonstrates that an emphasis on the subjective can help manifest the process of transgressing the law of One. The law of One asserts a patriarchal, monotheistic law as a social closed system and can be opposed to the bodily drives and its open dynamism. This project asserts that unique, creative voices are derived from that which is individual and personal and thus, readings of Confessional poetry are in fact best served by acknowledgment of the subjective. In order to stress the subject of the artist in Confessionalism, this study employed a psychoanalytical Kristevan approach. This enables consideration of the subject not only in terms of the straightforward narration of her life, but also in relation to her poetic language and the process of creativity where instinctual drives are at work. This study further applies a feminist reading to the subject’s poetic language and its ability to transgress the law, not necessarily in the political, macrocosmic sense of the word, but rather on the microcosmic, subjective level. Although Sexton and Plath possess similar biographies, their work does not have the same artistic value in terms of transformative capabilities. Transformation here signifies transgressing of the unity of the subject and of the authoritative father, the other within, who has prohibitive social and linguistic powers. Plath, Kristeva’s the “deadmost,” successfully confronts the unity of the law, releasing the death drive through anger. Moreover, Plath’s psychic borders are more fluid because of her ability to identify with the pre-Oedipal mother. This unsettling subject is identified by shifts in texts marked by renewal, transgression, and jouissance. Unlike Sexton, Plath is able to achieve transformation as she oscillates masochistically between the “inside” and the “outside” of her psychic borders, and between the symbolic and the semiotic. Furthermore, this enables Plath to develop the unique “Siren Voice of the Other.” In comparison, Sexton, the “dead/less,” evades any confrontation with the maternal and the performance of death in her poetry. Her case is further complicated by the discovery of a second mother. As a result, passivity becomes a main characteristic of her work. This passivity remains until the maternal abject bursts in her text and she reacts to this by performing cleansing rituals, and gravitating toward a symbolic father. Without the dynamism of transgression, Sexton’s work is heterogeneous but does not achieve ultimate transformation and jouissance. Confessional poetry, in this sense, takes on a new dimension. The life stories of the poets become important not for their pejorative, pathological aspects that focus on narrative mimesis, but rather for their manifestation as an aesthetic process. The subject of the writer becomes important as an aesthetic identity in the poems, which are rooted in real life. The main concern then becomes the aesthetic transformative dialectic between the semiotic and the symbolic in her work of art.

M.A. (English) / Please refer to full text to view abstract

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Thesis (M.A.)--Miami University, Dept. of Spanish and Portuguese, 2007. / Title from first page of PDF document. Includes bibliographical references (p. 54-57).

This dissertation explores John Ashbery's interactions with several generations of English poets, during a period which ranges from the late 1940s to the present day. It seeks to support two principle propositions: that Ashbery's engagements with contemporaneous English poets had a decisive influence on his poetic development; and that Ashbery's own poetic and critical work can be employed to revise our understanding of mid-to-late 20th century English poetry. The dissertation demonstrates that Ashbery's relationships with four English poets - W.H. Auden, F.T. Prince, Lee Harwood and Mark Ford - occurred at significant junctures in, and altered the course of, his poetic development. Ashbery's critical and poetic engagements with these poets, when read together, are shown to constitute an idiosyncratic but coherent re-reading of the English poetry of the past and present. The dissertation addresses the ways in which each poet theorises the difficulties posed, and opportunities afforded, by perceived changes in Anglo-American poetic relations at different points during the 20th century. Chapter one re-evaluates Ashbery's relationship with Auden. It traces the legacy of Auden's coterie poetics in The Orators for Ashbery and Frank O'Hara, offers a revisionary reading of The Vermont Notebook as a strident response to Auden's late-career conservativism, and reads in depth Ashbery's unpublished, highly ambivalent elegy for him, "If I had My Way, Dear". Chapter Two attends to the extensive correspondence between Ashbery and Prince, argues that Prince's work provided a model for Ashbery's "encrypted" early lyrics addressing his homosexuality, and reads "Clepsydra" as an early elaboration of Ashbery's conception of a reciprocal influential model. Chapter Three examines Lee Harwood's "imitations" of Ashbery, and considers the latter's first critical formation of an English "other tradition" through his association of Harwood with the work of John Clare. Chapter Four portrays Ashbery's relationship with Mark Ford as a successful enactment of reciprocal influence, a form of engagement which allows Ashbery a means to "shake off his own influence" and to retain his status as a "major minor writer".

Robert Frost’s legendary description of “the sound of sense” to define his poetics has for decades sounded like little more than common sense. His idea is now taken to be fairly straightforward: the inflections of an utterance resulting from the tension between demotic speech and poetic form indicate its purport. However, our accepted notion of Frost’s formulation as simply the marriage of form and meaning misconstrues what is potentially revolutionary in it: if everyday speech and verse form generate tension, then Frost has described a method for mediating between reality, represented by speech, and art, represented by verse form. The merger is not passive: the sound of sense occurs when Frost “drag[s] and break[s] the intonation across the metre.” And yet Frost places speech and verse form in a working relationship. It is the argument of this dissertation that poets reckon with what is often understood as discord between poetry and reality by putting into correspondence forms of speech and the forms of poetry. The poets I examine–Seamus Heaney, Gwendolyn Brooks, Tony Harrison, and Lucille Clifton–are concerned with their positions in local communities that range from the family unit to ethnic, religious, racial, economic, and sexual groups, and they marshal forms of speech in poetic form to speak from those locales and to counter the drag and break of those located social and political realities. They utilize what I call their “local languages”–the speech of their particular communities that situates them geographically in local contexts and politically in social constructs–in various ways: they employ them as raw material; they thematize them; they invent idiosyncratic “local” languages to undermine expectations about the communities that speak those languages; they devise generalized languages out of standard and nonstandard constructions to speak not just to and from specific locations but to speak more broadly about human experience. How, these poets ask, can poetry respond to atrocities, deprivations, divisions, and disturbances without becoming programmatic or propagandistic and without reinforcing false preconceptions about the kinds of language suitable for poetry? They answer that question with the living speech of their immediate worlds.