| In their careers as professional poets, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton made considerable reputations for themselves as pioneers in the Confessional mode. Beyond this narrow classification, however, their work shows the steady development of voice over the courses of their careers. The purpose of this study was to development a definition and theory of poetic voice as it relates to the technical choices each poet progressively made with respect to the effects that she wished to achieve in her poetry. Through the examination of poems from each and every one of their books, as well as views of poetry and the creative process in general that they express in journals, letters, and interviews, I determined that voice is comprised of the interplay between poet, speaker, subject, and reader, each element assuming a distinct role. Rather than equating the term voice with simply either the speaker of the poem or the poet, as critics generally do, this study proposes a dynamic concept of voice in which the relationship shifts according to the poet's intended effect.;While Plath's early poetry relied heavily on traditional modern form and subjects, Sexton discussed highly personal and hitherto taboo subjects in her early poems. In Plath's Colossus, for instance, speakers tend to comment on landscapes or observations, rather than an individual's psychological experience, while Ariel places the speaker at the center with her language as the most compelling element of the poem. In Sexton's To Bedlam and Part Way Back, childhood memories and adult experiences are dealt with at length in order to expose psychological effects on the individual. In The Awful Rowing Toward God, however, an individual's spiritual quest is an allegory for the state of humanity's spiritual deprivation in general.;In fact, toward the end of their careers, each poet's work became increasingly mystical, Plath's from the standpoint of achieved transcendance through an existential self-awareness and Sexton's from the standpoint of wishing for self-transcendance in the search for God. While Plath's poetry became increasingly effective as her career progressed, as a result of using colloquial language and organic form to describe truly mystical experience, rather than archaic language and strict form to make ordinary experience seem mystical, Sexton's successful combination of form and content was less consistent as she entered the final stage of her career. As she discussed increasingly abstract and amorphous subjects, such as religion, in her poetry, her command of language lessened, and her control of the elements of voice--poet, speaker, subject, and reader--decreased, subject being privileged over language and image. In their most successful poems, both poets show knowledge of this relationship between what a reader sees and hears, realizing that a poem is primarily an act of communication in which the reader must trust the poet to know her speaker and subject well and express this knowledge in the most effective language possible. |
