Gifts of Love, Gifts of Poison: Anne Sexton and the Poetry of Intimate Exchange

Abstract

This article argues that the confessional poem reflects an ambiguous relation between poet, reader and text. The confessional poem—at least as Sexton used it—does not so much reproduce a ‘real,’ as offer a distilled and complex gift that passes from the poet to the reader. As a gift, the confessional poem marks a site of desire, a textual locus which illuminates the complex desires of both speaker and reader. In this sense, if the poem offers a form of ‘life-writing,’ it does so differently, but no more or less than any other form of art. Utilising psychoanalytic concepts taken from Freud as well as Melanie Klein, this article reads Sexton's poetry as a series of texts through which to consider the role of poetry itself as an attempted act of reparation, reflective of the infantile relationship between mother and child. Within the space of poetry, with its shifting economy of exchange, of listening and speaking, the poem is seen as a complex gift to the intimate other of love and of toxicity that attempts to repair a damaged past, thus moving beyond the lures of the depressive while also charting, perhaps even facilitating, the seductions of the cataclysmic fall into the irreparably melancholic and disconnected. Rooted in artifice, the poem is always, in Sexton's terms, a ‘complicated lie,’ as well as, potentially, a form of ‘confession’ and release.