Bloom's Literary Themes - ymerleksi - home

214
The Poetry of Anne Sexton
coming to terms with them and with their small duplications in her
own life, to reach some kind of catharsis of pity and fear:
Only in this hoarded span will love persevere.
Whether you are pretty or not, I outlive you,
bend down my strange face to yours and forgive you.
If this act of mutual forgiveness with mother and father must be
repeated more than once, this is not a sign of weakness of resolve and
will and heart, but of their strengths and determination. No resolution
is ever quite so permanent as humans might wish. Anne Sexton
could not be utterly and finally freed of her ghosts and her guilt in
this life, and her poetry thus reveals these other “complicated lies:” of
poetry as celebration only, of knowledge as ultimate freedom. “What
forms the essence of our humanity—and of [Oedipus Rex]—is not
our being victims of fate, but our struggle to discover the truth about
ourselves.” 14 What forms the essence of Anne Sexton’s poetic achievement
is not her status as victim, but her struggle to discover the truth
about herself, to turn her blindness into insight. And unless we “turn
away,” like Jocasta, like John Holmes, there ought indeed to be “something
special” in “this kind of hope,” perhaps in private.
my kitchen, your kitchen,
my face, your face.
NOTES
1. Bruno Bettelheim, Freud and Man’s Soul (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1983), pp. 27–31.
2. Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Boston: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 1981), p. 34.
3. Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (New York:
Random House, 1974), p. xxi.
4. Bettelheim, pp. 23–24.
5. Bettelheim, p. 22.
6. Bettelheim, p. 23.
7. Bettelheim, p. 24.
8. Bettelheim, pp. 26–27.
9. Bettelheim, p. 27.