earticle

영어

With the spirit of the age shifting toward personal narrative and inner reflection, this paper revises the confessional poetry of Anne Sexton, who honed the art of self-revelation under the tutelage of Robert Lowell. By mastering the art of revealing private episodes of mental illness and confessing raw emotions and feelings caused by them, she fulfills her social responsibility for providing a model of confessing the hardship of fighting the mental illness for a general readership suffering from similar mental illnesses. Thus, through a close reading of Sexton's poems that embodies her strategy of dramatic confession, this paper will examine how she speaks up the themes that the mainstream social system does not want to hear and that are not considered as beautiful by the standards of mainstream literature, such as panic, depression, alcoholism, hallucinations, lesbian identity, loss of love, loss of family, menstruation, abortion, drug addiction, drug treatment, sex, erotic fantasy, religion, suicidal thoughts, and death. In conclusion, by shedding light on the difference of Sexton’s dramatic confessional poetry, this paper suggests Sexton should occupy a rightful place next to Lowell and Plath in the history of contemporary American poetry.