This essay is going to discuss and analyze the notions of “memory” and “ego” in the poetics of Anne Sexton. As will be explained, Sexton’s poetry deals with highly personal and subjective themes, such as her life-long mental disorder, intimate relations, and bodily experiences. Since Sexton began to write poetry as a protective means against her severe depression, this essay will discuss her poetry as an attempt to reconstruct her self-image and identity. Through her poetry, Sexton tends to reveal therapeutically her fermenting inner sufferings that may have caused negative feelings of unworthiness and alienation. However, her poetry is not an ultimate expression of a defeated and repressed self. The process of writing itself is the poet’s deliberate process of both deconstructing the past and reconstructing the present. That is to say, Sexton’s poetics does not merely reflect on subjectivity and selfhood. Rather, it extends to include notions of contradiction, indeterminacy, and historicity which are general characteristics of postmodern poetry in general. This essay, then, argues that Sexton’s poetics seems to oppose Modernist impersonal aesthetics. That is, Sexton seems to restore the Romantic speaking voice through lyrical representation.
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