Shakespeare sonnet 18 MP

Love sonnet 18 follows iambic pentameter and consists of three quatrains and a couplet, much like most of Shakespeare's other sonnets. The rhyme scheme is ababcdcdefefgg. Shakespeare compares a person to a summer's day, stating that the person is "more lovely and more temperate." Shakespeare then lists some negative aspects of summer saying that it is too short and sometimes gets too hot. "And summer's lease hath all too short a date, sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines." However, while summer has to end eventually, the beauty of this person will never fade. The person's beauty is immortalized by the fact he is putting them in a poem. "So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, So long lives this, and this gives life to thee." Shakespeare is capturing this person's beauty and making it eternal by the fact that this poem continuously lives on.

Anne Sexton Article

The article starts off with having two viewpoints about poetry:
1. The mad writer approach such as Edgar Allen Poe and Sylvia Plath that battle with "inner demons" in their poetry, and
2. therapeutic creative writing, where individuals use writing to cope with a difficult situation in their life and it has helped them overcome that problem.
The article states that although these two concepts are complete polar opposites, there seems to be a relationship-those with emotional or mental trouble leaning towards creative writing as an outlet of emotions.
The author first makes an analysis of mental illnesses but, unlike one of the three articles we read a few weeks ago, it uses the references very well and even states that "making distinctions can be particularly prone to error". Without manipulating the data, the author states how there is a high correlation between suicide rates and artists, such as writers or poets. Furthermore, suicidal poets tend to write for the self "revealing inward focus". It shows that they are socially shy as opposed to their non-suicidal mates. Schizophrenia is also mentioned to be another factor.
This article then starts talking about the Sylvia Plath effect as well. Female poets tend to pay attention to their depression, whereas male poets apparently tend to distract themselves, thus they are less likely to be suicidal. 

Dream Songs

John Berryman's poetry is very different to the other poems we have read so far. It is more..abstract and harder to decipher than the others. He uses a character called Henry in his poems, something that other poets have not created. Henry, as discussed in our classes, could be considered his alter-ego.
His style is usually writing in tercepts, quatrains, or a mixture of the two. His diction and grammar is very odd, although they are purposely written that way. Why they are written this way is a bit unclear but to me, it sounds like the poem is more raw, or, more original-giving it a very freestyle writing image, as if it were fresh from his thoughts without careful revision or any revision at all. 

3 Articles on Sylvia Plath (M.A)

I Bask in the Dreams of Suicide: Mental Illness, Poetry, and Women


The article talks about how female poets are more affected and prone to mental illnesses than male poets or other kind of artists, such as visual artists or prose writers. It has a very generalized analysis of the data, taking different types of experiments and just fitting them in to the topic of the paper. It is also very repetitive in its data and I find it very generalized. The article does not seem to have substantial data to prove its point. The article's beginning is also very negative, as to me, I did not want to read it anymore because of its pessimistic tone. Furthermore, it states that female poets tend to have the "Sylvia Plath" effect because poets start off as mentally unstable and it worsens when the poetry does not help them resolve their mental or emotional problems. It stated that although writing can be helpful for people to let go of emotions or deal with situations, it is unclear how valuable and helpful poetry is due to the statistics of female poets developing mental issues and their suicide rate.

Sylvia Plath and the Failure of Emotional Self-Repair
In this article, three dualities were listed by the author:
1. balance between creative individual's use of the audience to serve her own narcissistic interests
2. balance between destructive and constructive activity
3. interplay between pretense and fantasy.

The article talks about how Plath realized that poetry was self-destructing for her, yet she still kept writing poems. Some themes that were major themes of Plath's poems were her father's sudden death, and about suicide and pain as well.

Sylvia Plath: Fusion of the victim and suicide
According to the author, Sylvia Plath was able to use poetry to resolve some of her emotional and mental issues but it states that the poems would backfire and haunt her again, which it did. It also stated that if the poems are read in order (i.e. chronologically), it shows how Plath is forcing against death but towards the end of her life, the poems forces against death and suicide weaken, which shows her weakened stability of mind and her attraction towards suicide.

Sexton - BK

You can't help but draw parallels between Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, however there are differences between the two female poets as well. While the article explains the whole "female poet being more likely to have psychiatric problems" argument, it is also stated that Sexton was instructed to write to help her depression (known as the writing cure). I don't think it worked, but you can see in Plath's works such as "Wanting to Die" and "Suicide Note", that she put all of her feelings on to paper, openly expressing that suicide in on her mind. The way she describes it made me think of Plath discussing how it is an art form, although Sexton doesn't use the same metaphor, she talks about how a carpenter doesn't ask why build, just what tools. This is a comparison between suicide being a profession and that people who are suicidal aren't questions if they will do it, just how.

A lot of the info in the article by Kaufman we have seen before because it was referenced a lot in the articles on Plath.

I think that Sexton's style is more interesting than Plath's, she uses more of a narrative style that allows the reader in to her life, and get a new view point whereas Plath is more figurative. Also I think the rhythm in Sexton's poems are more enticing,

"Like a shoe factory amid the spruce trees / it squats; flat roof and rows of windows spying / through the mist." (Funnel)

"Tonight all the red dogs lie down in fear / and the wide and daughter knit into each other / until they are killed" (The Wifebeater)

With Sexton, I need to be in a certain mood to read her poetry. Most that I have read are very depressing and not usually the type of poetry I gravitate towards reading, although I think her poems are of merit.

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.

Anne Sexton Poems and Article- VB

The article was talking about a study done on the language of poems and how that correlated with suicide in any way. It used poems of poets who had committed suicide and was also testing two suicide models by analyzing text. This also pointed out that suicide rates are higher among poets than authors in other literary fields and the general population. Their are certain words that seem to be a trend in the writing of poets who commit suicide such as I, me, and my being used heavily. Also, there was a trend of suicide among poets who wrote more about death and lust as well.

Anne Sexton's poetry did have many hintings towards suicide but I feel she used her writing as a coping mechanism just like her close friend Sylvia Plath. However, just like Plath eventually neither of them were able to handle living in this world and took their own lives. Poetry was a release for them because they clearly had something unstable or wrong either in their minds or in their lives and poetry allowed them to express themselves in ways they could not in person. I believe that poetry also contributed to their suicides because it allowed them to get through situations without getting real help. They could only express their anger they could never confront the problems head on in their lives and caused the eventual breakdown of their mental health to the point where they took their own lives.

I feel that when reading poems written by Anne Sexton it is easy to make the connection that she is suicidal. However, I am not sure that I could have concluded that she committed suicide just by reading her poetry. She is very talented but it seems that her mental instability which was apparent in her poetry eventually wore her down. It would be interesting to see how different her life would have been without poetry.