Exploitation, larceny, masochism, sensationalism: the terms of opprobrium hurled against Sylvia Plath’s use of Holocaust material generally accord with George Steiner’s distress at any writer boasting “the right to put on this death-rig.”1 In , the same year Plath wrote “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” Adorno qualified his famous injunction against the barbarism of composing poetry after Auschwitz.2 Nevertheless, her appropriation of the voices of Holocaust victims still seems outrageous to those who reject any reasonable affinity or parallelism between Plath’s individual suffering and mass murder. These readers wonder: how dare she presume to imagine herself as one of the victims, to arrogate the Otherness of the deceased through a projection that might be said to profane the memory of people exterminated by the Nazis? To honor the dead, Elie Wiesel has cautioned, the living must comprehend that “no one has the right to speak on their behalf.”3 To some, Plath’s non-Jewishness, and her lack of a personal stake in the disaster, makes her speaking on behalf of the victims appear like a desecration. However, Plath’s adoption of the voices of the imagined, absent dead—her deployment of the rhetorical figure of prosopopoeia—is hardly anomalous. The same rhetorical device surfaces in some of the most powerful poems about the Shoah, poems composed by literary women and men with quite divergent relationships to the calamity.The impersonation of an absent speaker or a personification—prosopopoei—allows those poets searching to find a language for the staggering horror of what had happened to speak as, for, with, and about the casualties in verse. This enabling device has been either ignored or disparaged for too long. In “Posthumous Rehabilitation,” Tadeusz Rozewicz supposes that the dead, who “see our snouts,”“read our books,” and “scrutinize our lectures” cannot, or will not, exonerate the guilt of the living—“the dead will not rehabilitate us,” he insists.4 As if to counter this lack of rehabilitation, post-war poets who have confronted Western civilization’s guilt over the catastrophic genocide of the Final Solution sometimes attempt an admittedly nugatory, but nevertheless shocking, rehabilitation of the dead. Because the victims of the Holocaust did not have

Prosopopoeia and Holocaust Poetry in English: Sylvia Plath and Her Contemporaries

This dissertation examines how Anne Sexton wrote about and represented madness in her poetry and prose as well as in her public persona. Although Sexton began writing as a therapeutic exercise after a mental breakdown, and although she became a successful writer because of her brand of “asylum poetry, ” it is my assertion that her writing and public persona were symbolic representations through which she explored the concept of madness. Much effort has been put here on not reading the writings as evidence of Sexton’s psychopathology, but instead focusing on madness as one of many themes in her writing, her personal experiences a springboard from which she explored what she felt were universal issues. Sexton represented madness in her poetry first through the use of fixed verse forms as she learnt and mastered the craft of writing, but later in her career varied the style to use free verse and other experimental forms to explore madness in different ways. The mad poet was one of the first and major personae that she assumed in her writings, but there were other personae. Sexton invented and assumed the masks of other characters, such as family members, the witch/crone, characters in exile, and inanimate objects to explore what she referred to as greater “poetic truths. ” She also examined the problematic task of communication, especially the limitations of language in the conveyance of meaning. This is especially evident, I show, in the poems about her psychiatrist or where her personae address doctors. In addition to employing Sexton’s published writings and the work of other scholars and critics, this dissertation analyses Sexton’s archived materials at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and includes insights drawn from her unpublished writings, off-Broadway play, unpublished letters and lecture notes.

"The Ax for the Frozen Sea within Us": Representations of Madness in the Writings of Anne Sexton

This thesis examines the work of two contemporary South African poets, Antjie Krog and Joan Metelerkamp. Through an analytical-discursive engagement with their work, it explores the relationship between confession and embodiment, drawing attention to the ethical potential located at the confluence of these theories and modes. The theory informing this thesis is drawn from three broad fields: that of feminism, embodiment studies and ethical philosophy. More specifically, foundational insights will come from the work of Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas. While much of the theory used originates from Western Europe and North America, this will be mediated by sensitivity towards Krog and Metelerkamp’s South African location, as is fitting for a study focused on embodied confession and the ethical treatment of the other. The first chapter will establish Krog and Metelerkamp as confessional poets and explore the ethical implications of this designation. It will also explore the contextual grounds for the establishment for a confessional culture in both the United States of America of the 1950s that gave rise to the school of confessional poets, and in South Africa of the 1990s. The second chapter will use embodiment theory to discuss the relationship between poetry and the body in their work, and the ethics of this relationship. The remaining chapters concentrate on three forms of embodiment that frequently inhabit their poetry: the maternal body, the erotic body and the ageing body. Throughout the analyses of their poetic depictions of, and engagements with, these bodies, the ethical potential of these confessional engagements will be

Confession, embodiment and ethics in the poetry of Antjie Krog and Joan Metelerkamp

Words in a poem, sounds in movement, rhythm in space, attempt to recapture personal meaning in personal time and space from out of the sights and sounds of a depersonalised, dehumanised world. They are bridgeheads into alien territory. They are acts of insurrection. (R.D. Laing)It might be difficult to conceive of Anne Sexton as building "bridgeheads into alien territory." Indeed, despite her popularity she is often perceived as a kind of victim, and until very recently, much of the criticism of Sexton's poetry focused primarily upon her scandalous and disturbed life. This is particularly true in the decade following Diane Middlebrook's sensational biography (1991) which suggests that Sexton's work only leads back to a hallucinatory woman controlled by her madness and aberrations. But in the following pages I wish to argue that through the use of popular culture Anne Sexton attempts a revolution, a reconception of herself as well as the contemporary concepts of art and identity.Because so many readers discuss the difficulty of separating Sexton's life from her work,1 the devaluation of her life would in itself be a great obstacle to the understanding of her poetry. But just as it is difficult to imagine actually contextualizing her very personal voice in an additional or alternative framework to her biography, an alternative analysis seems irrelevant to her extraordinary poetry of the self. The usual paths into her poetry just don't seem to lead anywhere else than her self, and although we can identify the literary allusions, the psychoanalytic innuendoes, the feminist statements and the abject confessions, they fail to explain the attraction of her work. This is particularly true of her later poetry, which defies traditional methods of reading-not because the poems are impenetrable, but because they initially appear raw, associative, and replete with ostensible nonsense.But nonsense is by nature comparative and relative, and depends upon an alternative rationale. Often Sexton's apparent non sequiturs can be discovered to be heard parts of dialogue, and Joanna Gill has recently discussed this as an intentional strategy in "Hurry Up Please, It's Time." Gill argues that "the poem enters into a critical dialogue with Eliot's "The Waste Land," making sophisticated and purposive use of multiple personae, self-reflexively contemplating questions about memory, language, and subjectivity, and juxtaposing private introspection and public display." (2003, 41). This argument is strong and indicates that Sexton's work is not simply spun from the self, but that literary allusions and contexts are significant throughout her poetry.Sexton's poem refers to the Old and New Testaments of the Bible, to the Sibyls of classical mythology, and to Buddhist texts. Like Eliot's "The Hollow Men," her poem inserts incomplete fragments of prayer or Gospel, borrowing a line from the Book of Common Prayer ("Forgive us, Father, for we know not") which is, itself, a borrowing from the Gospels ("Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do" [Luke 23.34]). In both poems, these allusions are typographically set apart, as though to imply that they are spoken as an aside, or that we are in the presence of several simultaneous voices or levels of contemplation. That the quotations in both cases are incomplete suggests failure and confusion, and foreshadows the lack of resolution in the text as a whole. Sexton's poem juxtaposes the intense and mystical and the superficial and mocking, hence the refrain "La de dah" which mimics Eliot's "Weialala leia / Wallala leialala" and in so doing subverts its serious and incantatory potential. Indeed, Sexton's line parodies the presumptuous erudition of Eliot's phrase, mimicking its intonation and transforming it into a slang reference to snobbery. (Gill 2003, 43)Gill's work is a powerful step forward in lending validity to Sexton's language, imagery, and purpose and countering the constant accusation concarning what David Trinidad calls "the blatant deterioration of her talent," echoing numerous other critics and poets. …

The Dream Life of Ms. Dog: Anne Sexton's Revolutionary Use of Pop Culture

A recent trend in the study of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath often dissociates Confessional poetry from the subject of the writer and her biography, claiming that the artist is in full control of her work and that her art does not have naive mimetic qualities. However, this study proposes that subjective attributes, namely negativity and abjection, enable a powerful transformative dialectic. Specifically, it demonstrates that an emphasis on the subjective can help manifest the process of transgressing the law of One. The law of One asserts a patriarchal, monotheistic law as a social closed system and can be opposed to the bodily drives and its open dynamism. This project asserts that unique, creative voices are derived from that which is individual and personal and thus, readings of Confessional poetry are in fact best served by acknowledgment of the subjective. In order to stress the subject of the artist in Confessionalism, this study employed a psychoanalytical Kristevan approach. This enables consideration of the subject not only in terms of the straightforward narration of her life, but also in relation to her poetic language and the process of creativity where instinctual drives are at work. This study further applies a feminist reading to the subject‘s poetic language and its ability to transgress the law, not necessarily in the political, macrocosmic sense of the word, but rather on the microcosmic,

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Heather Cam

Papers

"Daddy": Sylvia Plath's Debt to Anne Sexton