Anne Sexton - Poetry/Articles - Jeet

The essence of the first article lies in two theories - 1) The Writing Cure 2) The Sylvia Plath Effect.
According the "writing cure", expressive and narrative writing about personal and emotional experiences ought to have therapeutic benefits for the mentally ill/depressed. According to the Sylvia Plath effect, women tend to ruminate more than men and are more affected by external constraints. These and other factors, combined with a non-narrative style of composing poetry may prove to be deleterious to the mental health of female poets. Anne Sexton was recommended to write for therapeutic reasons. Unlike Sylvia Plath however, her work is decidedly non-narrative in nature. Sexton carefully crafts her poems to elicit certain emotions and sympathies without explicitly narrating the underlying story.

"Even then I have nothing against life.

I know well the grass blades you mention,

the furniture you have placed under the sun.

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build."

In these lines, Sexton uses grass blades and furniture to signify the emotions she identifies
with feeling positively about life. Yet, it is unclear exactly what she is talking about. Perhaps, grass blades signify fertility and furniture hints at domesticity. Going back to her justification for suicides, she employs the somewhat distant analogy of carpenters. A clear storyline rarely emerges in Sexton's work. According to the writing cure, it is the narrative aspect that is most beneficial since it allows the writer to make meaning out of events and move on. In Anne Sexton's case, perhaps the lack of narrative meant she was constantly drudging up the traumatic experiences in her life and dwelling on their detrimental emotional effects through her poetry.

The second article looks at contemporary views on suicide and offers brief explications of Sexton’s poems – “Wanting to Die” and “Suicide Note”. A major distinction is made between euthanasia and other suicides. In our society, some sympathy is conferred upon the former; the latter always invites some repugnance and fear. In “Wanting to Die”, Sexton tries to persuade the reader of a rationality that might underlie a suicide that arises simply out of mental agony. She tries to establish suicide as natural and innocent when she speaks of children pondering upon the “sweet drug”. She hints that people might be born with a detached mental state that they cannot continue living with. Since they weren’t still born, it is rational that they wish to return to their state in the womb, where the first boundary between life and death exists.

The third article goes in depth into some linguistic research that was also cited in the first article. Suicidal poets tend to be more inward focused and a linguistic analysis of their writing confirms this. For instance, they use the first person singular noticeably more than the non-suicidal poets.