Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: Passion, perfection, and death through poetic confession

Within the lives and the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, there is an eerie sameness marked not only by personal and family dysfunction but by two selves making a connection through confessional poetry. These poets share a timeline, and its exposition is integral to an understanding of their poetry.;Both individually and collectively, the Lives of Plath and Sexton are quite extraordinary. The similarities of their childhoods, their parents, and their passion for death drew these "poetry seminar friends" together. Partly as a result of their friendship, highly personal poetry of a similar nature emerged. Their shared style, "confessionalism," caused their private lives to become public as each began a journey searching for the individual within and for the answers to countless troubling problems.;Unraveling their complex lives so publicly gave them power over those lives. Both poets had seen the liberating emotional release and leap in artistic power that their mentor and poetry seminar professor, Robert Lowell, had experienced by applying the art of confession to the poetry of his celebrated Life Studies. Poems written by both women reflect the lives they shared with each other and lived on their own. These powerful poems address the "split selves" of Sexton and Plath, the attempt to find a valid identity through poetry and confessionalism, and the search for a perfect self through death.;This study will help to show how, with their poetry as the driving force, Plath and Sexton worked through the respective hardships in their lives and how--though neither in the end chose to avoid suicide--their poetry gained a new clarity, finality, and purpose.