Anne Sexton

A detailed Summary of Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton became one of the best known of the often-controversial Confessional poets. Anne Sexton wrote openly about menstruation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when these topics were forbidden in poetry. There's possibly no other American in our time that has cried aloud publicly so many private details. In additional to focusing upon her emotional life, Sexton's 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."(

Knows'" (Sexton Live. Pg98) Sexton's 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.

So, the twisted metaphors and similes, symbolic images, and the vivid colors bring life to these amazing transformed poems. So, women poets in particular owe a debt to Anne Sexton, who broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the way because of the greatness of her subject matter, which twenty years later, seems far less daring. Her 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. Of all the Confessional poets, none has had quite

Sexton Trans. Pg3) This other twisted metaphor depicts theme and tone for the "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." "Her stepmother, a beauty in her own right, though eaten of course, by age, would hear of no beauty surpassing her own. Beauty is a simple passion." (Sexton Trans. Pg3) 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 Pg181-182) Another quote from Love Poems that makes women a symbol comes from "The Kiss": "My mouth blooms like a cut. I've been wonged 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 v

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