Textual Confessions: Narcissism in Anne Sexton’s Early Poetry

Abstract

Confessional poetry, a mode that was prominent in United States in 1960s and early 70s, has, over time, come to be regarded as a regrettable, aberrant, and momentary spasm in development of that nation's literature. It is habitually, if a little inaccurately, consigned to a specific and distant time and place: Robert Phillips, author of first and indeed only full-length account of mode, situates it in Post-Christian, post-Kennedy, post-Pill America (xiii). Its chief impact is now understood as providing a foil against which to measure sophistication and achievements of postconfessional writing--Language poetry, New York school, and various other avant-garde and postmodern forms. As Alan Williamson suggests, poetry--almost from moment that unfortunate term was coined--has been whipping boy of half a dozen newer schools, New Surrealism, New Formalism, Language (Stories 51). Marjorie Perloff defines exciting that dominate contemporary American by distinguishing them from an earlier of lyricism: The more poetries of past few decades, whatever their particular differences, have come to reconceive opening of field, not as an entrance into authenticity but, on contrary, as a turn toward toward as making or praxis rather than as impassioned speech, as self-expression. (Changing Face 93) Similarly, Michael Davidson characterizes interests of current Language by reference to its difference from that preceded it: Language writing bases its analysis of authority not on author's particular politics but in means by which any statement claims its status as truth. Moreover, by foregrounding abstract features of speech act rather than authenticity of expressive moment, poet acknowledges contingency of utterances in social interchange. (74) Both Perloff and Davidson define postmodern by reference to its other--confessional or self-expressive poetry. Yet paradoxically, as argument below demonstrates, what fundamentally characterizes this other and thus gives definition to is same deeply embedded interest in artifice, in poetry as making or and in verbal means by which any statement claims its status as as is thought to characterize postconfessional writing alone. Authenticity, artifice, praxis, and truth are crucial and contested terms here. The implication that contemporary avant-garde is radical while confessional that preceded it is reactionary and conservative itself merits scrutiny. In its own time confessional was perceived to be a profoundly movement. It represented a startling departure from--and offered powerful and potentially fatal resistance to--the conventions of high academic that it succeeded, a literature that Irving Howe describes as responsible and moderate. And tame (qtd. in Gray 216). For A. Alvarez, one of form's earliest champions and commentators, confessional or extremist (229) had apocalyptic potential. Its function--indeed its responsibility--was to break mould of what he termed the accepted Academic-Modern style. It is apparent from any survey of criticism of confessional that mode is habitually and negatively associated with an authorial self-absorption verging on narcissism. Elizabeth Bruss, for example, refers to narcissistic indulgence of confessional tradition (18). Edward Lucie-Smith, writing in 1964 in Critical Quarterly, argues that in contemporary personal introversion seems to have triumphed over experiment. The poet gazes with obsessive narcissism at his own reflection in mirror of art (357). …