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Anne Sexton became one of the most popular of the often-controversial Confessional poets. Anne Sexton wrote explicitly about menstruation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when these topics were forbidden in poetry. Theres possibly no other American in our time that has cried aloud publicly so many private details. In additional to focusing upon her emotional life, Sextons later work includes frequent allusions to mythology, fairy tales, and Christian motifs, and explores such topics as romantic love, motherhood, and relationships between the sexes.
So, Anne Sexton uses twisted metaphors and similes, symbolic images, and vivid colors to tell about her transformed poems. By using twisted metaphors and similes as a technique in her writing, Sexton transforms her poems to be anything but the ordinary. Using metaphors in Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs contribute to the breezy contemporary sound. In addition, nearly every line of this quote uses simile or metaphors to develop them and tone: No matter what life you lead/ the virgin is a lovely number: / cheeks as fragile as cigarette paper, / arms and legs made of Limoges, / lips like Vin Du Rhone, / rolling her china-blue doll eyes/ open and shut. (Sexton Trans. Pg 3) This other twisted metaphor depicts theme and tone for the Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. In In Celebration of My Uterus as one of the few poems in which a woman has come to the fact as a symbol, the center after many years of silence and taboo that is delineation of femaleness so fanatical that it makes one wonder.
Everyone in one is a bird. / I am beating all my wings. / They wanted to cut you out/ but they will not. / They said you were immeasurably empty/ but you are not/ they said you were sick unto dying/ but they were wrong. / You are singing like a school girl/ you are not torn. (Sexton Love Poems Pg 181 - 182) Another quote from Love Poems that makes women a symbol comes from The Kiss: My mouth blooms like a cut. Ive been wanted all year, tedious nights, nothing but rough elbows in them and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby, crybaby, you fool! (Sexton Love. Pg 174) Now in Live and Die, the poem Flee on Your Donkey contains metaphors so vivid that the actual hornets can remind the speaker first of flowers, than transmogrify into stinging, hissing, threatening things that recall frightening radio programs of the speakers youth: The Hornet knows. Hornets have been sent.
They cluster like floral arrangements on the screen. Hornets dragging their thin stingers hover outside. All knowing, hissing the hornet Knows (Sexton Love. Pg 98) Sextons work rapidly became a point of contention over which opposing factions dueled in print, at literary gatherings, and in the fastnesses of the college classroom. Symbolic Imagery speaks in most of these poems that sound reflective, contemplative, and mature, which offers new memorable images that, expressed most often in free verse, are both more appropriate and more surreal than before.
The book Love Poems offers appropriate and crystal clear images for the reader to see especially in The Touch. For months my hand had been sealed off in a tin box. Nothing was there but subway railings. Now in The Break: It was also my violent heart that broke falling down the front hall stairs. It was also a message I never spoke, calling riser after riser, who cares (Sexton Love Pg 190) The two quotes show images that the speaker can see that these poems definitely contain love in them. The Touch, in Love Poems, offers an appropriate introduction both in the way that Sexton suggests (establishing the notion that all of these love poems are a celebration of touch) and in a way that she perhaps does not consciously intend.
In second, The Break extends the female / passive and males / active motif while realizing in greater detail the imagery of violence that links love or its absence with torment, anger, and death. All in all, these love poems contain the images that can reflect maturity for the reader to witness. By using vivid colors as another technique in her writing Sexton transforms her poems to vibrant colorful images in the brain. The book of poems Live or Die engine a more controlled, analytical approach to the Confessional style to show color than her other volumes before this one. Color clearly shows in Three Green Window: Half awake in my Sunday nap I see there green windows in three different lights-one west, one south, one east. (Sexton Love.
Pg 105) Color also shows in Love Song; the one/ with her eyes half under coated her large gun metal blues yes, with the think vein at the bend of her neck that hummed like a tuning fork, with her shoulders as bare as a building. (Sexton. Live or Die. Pg 115) The Live or Die poems shows concerns, difficulties, and successes in the sort of natural progression that monthly experience brings, so that the reader becomes a spectator to a sort of continuous musing on life and death, on hope and despair through color. The Three Green Windows poem starts out by dominating the speakers trance like the consciousness, creating within her a feeling of peace and safety. Also, in Transformations, the color throughout the book shocks and amazes the reader to picture a perfect fairy tale image. Anne Sexton points both to her strange adaptation of the tales for her own creative use to relate such as an enlarged paper clip, to pop-art quality.
But now the queen saw brown spots on her hand and four whiskers over her lip so she condemned Snow White to be hacked to death. (Sexton Trans. Pg 5) Another creative, gruesome quote comes from Godfather Death: His white head hung out like a carpet bag and his crotch turned blue as a blood blister, and Godfather death, as it is written, put a finger on his back for the big blackout, the big no. (Sexton Trans. Pg 34) In Transformations, Sexton puts an unnoticeable evil laugh through the use of the veracious color that she uses in the book. Such as Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the quote explains through so many words that Snow Whites beauty surpasses the once beautiful but aged queen, and she cant have that happen.
So in order to get rid of Snow White, the queen sends a huntsman to murder her. The other quote from Godfather Death shows crystal clear on how the man died through the vivid color scheme. All in all, this choice of poems illustrates color through the characteristics, wittiness, and inventiveness of each poem. Sextons poetry aims to acquaint the reader with the whole work of an important mid-century American poet such as in Love Poems, Live and Die, and Transformations. Despite her popularity and acknowledgement in the literary world she flirted dangerously with suicide attempts several times throughout her life. She attended Garland Junior College for one year.
Marrying Alfred Muller Sexton II at the age of nineteen gave birth to a daughter, Linda, in 1953. Her first breakdown was diagnosed as postpartum depression and resulted in hospitalization. Her second child, Joy, was born in 1955, and Sexton suffered another breakdown and was again hospitalized. On her birthday that same year, she attempted suicide.
In December of that year, under the guidance of her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin, she resumed writing poetry. Finding therapeutic value in her writing, she enrolled in John Holme's poetry workshop, where she met Maxine Kevin. Yet falling, once again into a deep depression, Anne attempted suicide again in May 1957. Despite her success as a writer, poet, and playwright, Anne's personal life took a sudden plunge in 1973, where she was hospitalized three times and received a divorce from her husband during the course of the year. Surviving much of the following year, Anne managed to bring her final works to a conclusion with the punishment of The Death Notebooks, a final editing of The Awful Rowing Toward God, and a tentative arrangement of poems in 45 Mercy Street.
The conclusiveness of the works seemed to Anne to be a proper stopping point. Following her last poetry reading at Goucher College in Maryland on October 3, 1974, Anne returned home to commit suicide in her garage on October 4, 1974 by way of carbon monoxide poisoning. The tragic end she brought to her life was the result of years of battling depression and dissatisfaction with her place in life. Despite this truth, she carved a place in the minds and hearts of the American literary world forever. Words: 1441 Bibliography: Sexton: Selected Criticism, edited by Diana Hume George, University of Illinois Press, 1988 Critical Essays on Anne Sexton, edited by Linda Wagner-Martin, G. K.
Hall, 1989 Diane Wood Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography. Houghton Mifflin, 1991 McClatchy, J. D. , ed. Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1978. Anne Sextons poems: Love Letter Written In A Burning Building, Tranfromations, Love poems, Love or Dye.
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Research essay sample on Anne Sexton Became One Of The Most Popular
