Comparing Feminist Poetry by Plath and Sexton Essay -- Feminism Femini

Comparing Feminist verse by Plath and Sexton Poetry should be a shock to the senses. It should also hurt Anne Sexton believed (Baym 2703), and consequence of this maxims implications echoes loudly through the writing of Sexton as well as through the work of her friend and contemporary Sylvia Plath. Plath and Sextons lifetimes spanned a period of funny change in the social role of women in America, and two atomic number 18 obviously feminist poets caught somewhere between the submissive pasts of their mothers and the liberated futures awaiting their daughters. With hardly a(prenominal) established female poets to emulate, Plath and Sexton broke new ground with their intensely personal, confessional poetry. Their anger and frustration with female subjugation, as well as their torturesome personal struggles and triumphs appear undisguised in their works, but the fact that both Sexton and Plath committed suicide inevitably colors what the reader gleans from their poems. Howeve r, although their poems, oft(prenominal) as Plaths Daddy and Sextons Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman, deal with the authors private experiences, they retain elements of universality their language cuts through a layer of soul perspective to reach a current of raw emotion general to all human, but especially female, understanding.In Plaths Daddy, written just sooner her death and published posthumously, the most readily accessible emotion is anger, and much of the poem is couched in autobiographical allusions. Plaths own father died of a unhealthy infection, caused by diabetes he refused to treat, when Plath was eight years old, and his death was the crucial proceeds of her childhood (Baym 2743). Plath get outs personal references to her father as a... ...life struggles and human relationships- of the things women carry with them that make them who they are. Works CitedBaym, Nina. General Editor. Anne Sexton. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. fif th ed. New York W.W. Norton, 1998. 2703-4.---Sylvia Plath. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. fifth ed. New York W.W. Norton, 1998. 2742-44.Electra Complex. The World Book Medical Encyclopedia. Rush-Presbyterian-St. Lukes Medical Center, Chicago. April 2002. < http//www.rush.edu/index.html.Plath, Sylvia. Daddy. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. fifth ed. General Editor, Nina Baym. New York W.W. Norton, 1998. 2748-50.Sexton, Anne. Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. 5th ed. General Editor, Nina Baym. New York W.W. Norton, 1998. 2707-09.