Policy and feminism in confessional poetry

Several exaggerations also take place in this poem, and the main one is transforming almost-death to actual-death. “And like the cat I have nine times to die. This is Number Three” - before these lines the reader is convinces that Plath is talking about suicide attempts, and these lines change the readers' minds. “Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well”, -- Plath puts in the poem. It becomes clear that the strategy her speaker is using is dying over and over again, and coming back to life each time. Each time she rises from the dead, she becomes more and more powerful - in the beginning of the poem, after her first death, she asks: “O my enemy. Do I terrify?”. Keeping in mind that later in the poem the mentioned “enemy” appears again, only for that second time he is called “Herr Enemy”, it can be concluded that her proclaimed enemy is her father, because he was German and in other poems (in particular “Daddy”) his image is also constructed with the usage of German-related words. Thus, I can assume that before the first death the speaker had fear of dying - because “it was an accident”, so she did not plan to commit suicide and thus she feared; later on in the poem the speaker asks whether she terrifies, because she is not sure anymore if there is an object of fear and if yes, what or who it is. Since she came back from the dead, she does not fear death anymore - although she might be afraid of her father, who appears in the previous line “O my enemy”.

Finally, in the end of the poem, all the fear of father is gone - “Herr God, Herr Lucifer beware beware”. This line also remind the readers about hysterical discourse, because it seems like a spontaneous speech. The speaker arises for the third time and it is the strongest version of herself, she does not have any fear now and she is ready for resistance: “Out of the ash I rise with my red hair and I eat men like air”. Thus, the strategy Plath's speaker has chosen is dying over and over in order to get rid of all fear and gain enough power to fight back men, which she successfully performs.

Taking the analysis into consideration, I can claim that the poem “Lady Lazarus” contains, first of all, Plath's dominant device that is hyperbolizing experiences from real life, then a lot of biographical details. Plath uses the same technique of creating confessional truth as it was shown previously - she takes an experience from real life (her attempts of suicide), exaggerates it (attempt is transformed into actual death), entwines it into poem and the readers themselves perceive these hyperboles as devices - and thus confessional truth is produced.

The conclusion for the section might be the following one. In accordance to Foucault's claim about truth being produced as a result of confession, I can say that Robert Lowell, although before writing a poem he deviates the truth and he uses made-up facts about him in his poems, has a special kind of confessional truth. This confessional truth is produced as a result of reading his poems by the audience, because his method of writing works and the readers feel sorry for him, thus, his aim is fulfilled. Speaking of the next poetess, Sylvia Plath, she also deviates the truth, only she does that in the very poem by exaggerating imagery from real life. Her readers are aware that those hyperboles are not real images but just devices to convey the poetess' confessional truth.

2. Politics and feminism in female confessional poetry

2.1 Anne Sexton and her volume «Transformations»

Speaking about the next poet, Anne Sexton, it is possible to claim that she is considered to be one of the most significant confessional poets. Comparing her poetry to Plath's, Anne Sexton has definitely gone further than Plath in terms of covering the tabooed topics; while Plath's central themes were suicide and incest, Sexton wrote also about women's physiology: for example, one of her poems is called “Menstruation at Forty”. In the article “Anne Sexton and Confessional Poetics” by Jo Gill, the following is said about her: “Anne Sexton has been described as the `High Priestess' and the `Mother' of confessional poetry” (Gill 425). Although firstly she denied these labels, later Sexton named herself “the only confessional poet” (Sexton, “A Self-Portrait in Letters” 372).

One of her poems mentioned in the article is “Her Kind”. It is believed to be “an entirely characteristic Sexton poem” by the author of the article: “It problematizes the process of writing, showing it to be subject to particular, and persistent, pressures” (Gill 438). Gill claims that in this poem, the relationship between writer and audience is reflected upon. “I have gone out, a possessed witch. Haunting the black air, braver at night [] A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind” (Sexton, “The Complete Poems” 15). There is a clear distinction between the speaker who equals Sexton and the character, “dreaming evil”, “lonely thing”, “possessed witch”, who goes out only at night. This character is a poet who writes confessional poetry, and she is dissociated with Sexton, who equals the speaker. In the second stanza, relationship between the poet and the audience is described: “I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned”. The poetic self of Sexton suffers and writes about it, so that her audience - “the worms and the elves” -- is able to enjoy the reading. That image reminds about the particular relationship Lowell had with his audience. Sexton poetic self “whines” and suffers in order for her readers to sympathize with her; however, the poetic self and Sexton herself are dissociated in the poem, and it gives an idea that subjects of poetic self's sufferings are not taken from Sexton's real life, but they are made up. The image of her poetic self “waving nude arms” gives an idea about her being very direct while writing poems, which is also one of significant indicators of confessional poetry. Thus, after analyzing the poem, I can conclude that Sexton's confessional truth is composed the same way as Lowell's one.

The author of the article also puts the following remark: “Sexton's speaker explicitly claims the bravery so valorized in confessional poetry, yet her claim is undermined by the fact that she makes it only at night, under cover of darkness” (Gill 463). It might be a sign of switching a direction regarding modes of poetry, because in 10 years after publication of that poem, Sexton published a volume called “Transformations”, which is completely different comparing to the rest of her works. She moves away from confession and approaches the method of revising myths.

One of Sexton's main methods used in the volume "Transformations" that is of interest in the present work is taking an existing narrative brought up in patriarchal culture and transforming it into feministic narrative. For instance, she has dedicated that volume to pointing out well-known by her readers storylines and showing how misogynistic and terrifying they are. She mocks the female characters who were praised in tales - and mocks such their qualities as virginity and naiveté that were also praised. This mentioned volume is highly feministic and political, because the author distinguishes traditional narrative and feministic narrative, and feels the need to create her own feministic narrative instead of traditional one.

Before taking a closer look at the volume, it is necessary to consider a work by Alicia Ostriker called “The Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking”. There Ostriker raises a topic of female language. There was a need in it, because in order to create female poetry apart of male one, women needed to create a separate language for writing. This movement was called a feminist revision, and one of the possible ways of performing it was called “revisionist mythmaking” (Ostriker 71). Ostriker explained what it was using the example of Anne Sexton's volume “Transformations”: when the female author takes a famous existing narrative and rewrites it, it is called revisionist mythmaking.

There was a need, as Ostriker claimed, to create a new language for female writers, because the language they used at a time was oppressor's language “inadequate to describe or express women's experience” (Ostriker 69). Ostriker raises the following question: is there a language that fits for expressing women's experience, or do they need to steal oppressor's language? Although she does not answer this question in the paper, she lists several most important women writers of the second half of 20th century (Sylvia Plath is there among the others) and points out that these poetesses performed “a vigorous and various invasion” of the sanctuaries of existing language” (Ostriker 71). In her other work, “Body Language: Imagery of the Body in Women's Poetry”, Ostriker investigates how modern poetesses take images which were traditionally believed to symbolize women - for example, flowers - and in their poems leave the same symbolic connotation, however, they transform the reason why it symbolizes women: there flower means power instead of tenderness and so on (Ostriker, “Body Language: Imagery of the Body in Women's Poetry” 251). That was an example of revisionist mythmaking: transforming well-known narratives from misogynistic to feministic; and a myth is defined by Ostriker as “a figure or story previously accepted and defined by a culture” (Ostriker 72). Very popular images for transformation were images of gods - for example, in C.J. Jung's and Erich Neumann's poems the creator was transformed into the creatrix. In accordance to Ostriker, Plath and Sexton immediately come to mind because of their female demonic images such as Plath's heroine from “Lady Lazarus”, Sexton's witches from “To Bedlam and Part Way Back” and so on. However, Ostriker emphasizes, that in those demonic images belonging to Plath and Sexton the readers find features of passivity: “muteness, blindness, paralyses, the condition of being manipulated” (Ostriker 77).

Among the big works, volumes of poetry, reviewing existing mythology, Ostriker mentions Sexton's “Transformations” and Susan Griffin's “Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her”. “An important source of Sexton's effectiveness is her striking ability to decode stories we thought we knew, revealing meanings we should have guessed”, -- that is what Ostriker claims about the volume “Transformations” (Ostriker 85).

In order to rewrite the existing narrative, Sexton does the following things: she “demolished the heroic characterization traditionally assigned to male figures” - that is stated in the next article “Fairy Tales Revisited and Transformed: Anne Sexton's Critique of Social(ized) Femininity” by M.M. Gonzalez (Gonzalez 12). In fairy tales, the roles assigned to males were those of saviors - if they saved women from danger - or husbands - when they married women. The author of the article argues that feminist activists were to get rid of the existing stereotype about the roles assigned both to male and female; although Sexton does this, she demolished these roles using irony - she does not offer something else instead, and also she does not try to inspire women to take a more active position in terms of feminism. What she does, claims the author, is giving the readers ideas about rethinking the existing narrative and reconsidering the notions implemented in the collective unconscious, presented in fairy tales.

As an example to this claim, I will use the poem “Cinderella” form this volume. The plot of the poem is nearly the same as in the original tale: Cinderella is the maid in the rich family with two daughters (only a stepmother is changed into a rich father); when the ball happens, where the prince wants to find a wife, Cinderella is not allowed to go. The white dove, who first appeared at the grave of her mother, helps her with everything she is assigned to do, and then she goes to the ball and meets a prince. What is transformed in the poem comparing to the original story is the attitude of the speaker. That is how the poem begins: “You always read about it: the plumber with twelve children who wins the Irish Sweepstakes. From toilets to riches. That story” (Sexton, “The Complete Poems” 255). Then, the speaker goes on for three more stanzas and describes stories about poor unhappy people who luckily become rich; two out of those three stanzas end up with a sarcastic phrase “that story”. The speaker perceives this kind of stories very ironically; the phrase “you always read about it” implies that such plots are common in literature but exist only in books, not in reality. That is how the story of a nursemaid is briefly described in the second stanza: “From diapers to Dior”. The alliteration of chosen words makes them ironic: even though they sound similar, the meanings are widely different.

After this introduction with descriptions of other stories, the speaker begins to tell Cinderella's story. It is also told with a frequent usage of irony: when talking about the bird who helps Cinderella, she puts: “The bird is important, my dears, so heed him”. The speaker addresses directly the audience, which consists, as it can be assumed, from girls and women who skeptically perceive this kind of fairy tales. When telling about Cinderella's stepmother's prohibitions, the speaker adds: “That's the way with stepmothers”, pointing out that this plot is very banal and predictable; for the same purpose the following quote about Cinderella getting permission to come to the ball is used: “So she went. Which is no surprise”.

Later in the poem, the irony becomes absurd. Sexton exaggerates the desire of two sisters to marry the prince and makes them cut their feet in order to fit into the shoe. “That's the way with amputations”, -- indifferently remarks she. The figure of the prince is also briefly mocked: “The prince was getting tired. He began to feel like a shoe salesman”. In the end, the absurd reaches its top: the dove flies into the wedding ceremony and picks out the eyes of two Cinderella's sisters, leaving “two hollow spots”. All the characters in the poem do not seem to be alive, they seem more like dolls - for example, when the sisters who easily cut their toes in order to fit in a shoe, or when the bird picks out their eyes and they do not react. Even Cinderella and prince are compared to dolls in the end: “Like two dolls in a museum case”. The speaker describes their `perfect' life after the wedding: “Never bother by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice, never getting a middle-aged spread”.

Thus, in the poem Sexton does not offer another social role to women instead of the one presented in fairy tales - on the contrary, she rewrites the original narrative using irony and exaggerates the male and female roles: if in the original the characters seem unreal, in the poem they are compared to dolls. Also, she creates the collective “we” consisting of women who perceive those fairy tales as misogynistic and addresses them, inviting them to mock all the peculiarities of the traditional narrative with her.

Among the roles assigned to females, Sexton points out two of them and writes about them ironically. First, she mocks a pattern of an ideal girl, main heroine of a fairy tale, who should be a virgin, also should be young, naïve, beautiful - especially more beautiful than other females around her. The second pattern is the one of another woman who might be characterized as a witch both judging by actions and appearance. This distinction between two patterns mostly results in a conflict between females representing different patterns. It is so, because traditionally the “alienation of women from each other in patriarchal culture” was built up, as it is put in the article of Adrienne Rich called “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” (Rich 23). After some time of the characters fighting each other, the tale usually results into the girl marrying a prince and a cruel woman dying of jealousy and envy. What is notable, is a fact that throughout the tale the characters are nor developed or changed in any way - the girl is confident that she is rewarded by her prince and husband for her initial qualities such as naiveté, virginity and so on.

That is mocked by Sexton - for example, in the beginning of the poem “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” the main heroine is described as “a lovely virgin” (Sexton, “The Complete Poems” 224). Later on, she is called by the author “a dumb bunny” - which diminishes her ability of thinking, but however makes a comment on her appearance and basically means he is pretty. In the very end, the heroine “rolls her china-blue doll eyes”, which also means that there is no intellect in her eyes, because they are like the eyes of a doll, so without any emotions of thought; on the other hand, the comparison of the heroine and a doll tells us that she is pretty. Thus, nothing has changed in the description of the heroine throughout the poem, the character remains static.

Sexton also reflects upon sexuality in this volume in a rewritten version of Rapunzel. In a poem, she makes a relationship between Rapunzel and her step-mother clearly homosexual: “They would play rummy or lie on the couch and touch and touch and touch. Old breast against young breast” (Sexton, “The Complete Poems” 244). Here Sexton again approaches the abovementioned stereotype about alienation of women required by patriarchal culture. Both heroines of that poem have a strong relationship with each other, and that helps them to break the frame of patriarchy, because the marriage is of no interest for them.

I will proceed to analysis of “Briar Rose” (a rewritten “Sleeping Beauty”). The most part of the poem reflects the same plot as the one in the tale: the princess is cursed, cuts her finger by a wheel and the whole kingdom falls asleep with her. One day a prince comes, kisses her and the princess wakes up crying: “Daddy! Daddy!” (Sexton, “The Complete Poems” 290). Sexton develops a motif of incest between a heroine - sleeping beauty - and her father. Firstly, the author impersonalizes that experience, she creates an archetype from it, makes the heroine of a fairy tale suffer from sexual relationship with her father. However, the actual act of incest is not mentioned yet - there are only some clues to expecting it, like her cry “daddy” after waking up or the scene from the very beginning of the poem, where her father gives the princess kisses and says: “Little doll child”. Here, as well as in the previously analyzed poem, female characters are compared to dolls.

However, at the very end of the poem, that experience of incest becomes personalized, all of a sudden the heroine previously referred to as “she” disappears, and first personal pronoun “I” appears, and the act of incest is clearly emphasized. It even seems that the heroine is changed: as if the story of the princess is finished, and the new one begins at the end of the poem from the lines: “There was a theft. That much I am told. I was abandoned”. This heroine definitely goes through incest with her father - “My father drunkenly bent over my bed, circling the abyss like a shark, my father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish”.

That switch serves for two purposes. Firstly, for making a poem political and feministic, because in the beginning of the poem the experience of incest is presented very blurry and not relatable, but then is appears to be closer and more real than it seemed. Secondly, that method of creating a poem out of a fairy tale affects the distance between the readers and the speaker - in the beginning, the distance is huge, because all the characters are archetypical, but then it shortens suddenly, because the confessional “I” appears.

The second heroine that appears at the very end says “each night I am nailed into place and I forget who I am”. She does not remember where she is and who is around her. “Daddy? [] It's not the prince at all”. Turn out that this second heroine is the same person as the sleeping beauty, only she is real - she has made up the kingdom, prince and the sleep inside her head in order to escape from the reality where she suffers from incest. That is why she does not recognize her father at first and mixes him up with imagined prince: “It's not the prince at all, but my father”. The fear of incest has gotten even into her fantasy: when she is woken up by the imagined prince, she says “daddy” unconsciously.

I can claim that the end of the poem becomes confessional for the following reasons. First of all, the speaker's speech becomes direct and spontaneous: “Daddy? [] My father thick upon me like some sleeping jellyfish”. Secondly, what she describes is very intimate and tabooed, but she still talks about it.

This poem is the last one in the volume. It ends with a question: “What voyage this, little girl? This coming out of prison? God help - this life after death?”. The sudden shift from the fairy tale, from the fantasy world to the severe reality appears right at the end of the volume; simultaneously appears the shift from archetype of a girl from fairy tales, who looks like a doll and will marry a prince, to the too realistic image of a girl, who is raped by her father. “What voyage this, little girl?” -- asks Sexton at the end. By the voyage, she means going back and forth between fantasy and reality. In the end of this poem, irony is not used anymore, Sexton is not mocking the fairy tales-characters; the focus shifts to closely observing reality and pointing out real horrid things happening to women.

Taking everything into consideration, it is possible to claim the following things about revisionist mythmaking taking place in Anne Sexton's volume “Transformations”. Sexton's technique is not rewriting the narrative completely and offering women other social roles in her poetry, but rewriting the original ironically and only with slight changes of plot; she uses irony and exaggerations to show how misogynistic the original narrative is. Thus, feminism in this volume is not in showing what women need to do, but in mocking the traditional stereotypes about what women are supposed to do. Considering everything, it is possible to claim the following things about feminism in Sexton's volume. At first, she starts with mocking the traditional stereotypes belonging to fairy tales about women being beautiful, week and that they are saved by men; about men being strong and rich. Sexton mocks all of them using irony and exaggerations; for instance, the beauty and naiveté of females praised in tales she hyperbolizes, and thus makes her characters unreal and compares them to dolls. Then, the switch between the archetypical image of a girl and a realistic image of a girl appears, and the collective “we” of women mocking the tales turns into confessional “I” suffering from rape.

Now I need to identify the imagery of incest in Sexton's works. In the first chapter of the book “Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life with Daddy”, the author, Gale Swiontkowski, examines the definition of Electra complex in terms of psychology; then the author applies Freud's hypothesis to Plath's and Sexton's poetry. Gale Swiontkowski claims that the incest described in poetry not necessarily refers to personal experience, but is more shown as an archetype, because in order to reach full self-realization, women must test limits and approach forbidden topics. Sexton in her poetry identifies herself through a comparison with the significant male Other, her poetic persona always seeks affirmation in male authority. Both poetesses created father-like figures which were meant to meet the needs of their poetic personas. They sought not love from incestual father-like figures but affirmation and acceptance from male authority.

Coming back to analyzing Sexton's volume, the following conclusions might be made. In Sexton's poetry, the contrast between mocking traditional narrative, thus uniting the audience into one collective “we”, and using an image of incest to convey a yearn for acceptance from male authority, is used. Sexton uses the same technique Lowell uses: in the end of the poem “Briar Rose”, she victimizes her speaker, makes her equal to herself and with the usage of confessional “I” tells about rape in order to make the audience sympathies her and thus make the mentioned contrast stronger so that the poem is more political. Thus, Sexton's confessional truth is a tool for making her poetry more feministic and more political.

2.2 Sylvia Plath and Maxine Kumin: their revisionist mythmaking

Now I will take a look at one poem by Sylvia Plath in order to find out how revisionist mythmaking functions in it.

The next analyzed poem by Sylvia Plath is “Lorelei”, published in a volume “The Colossus” in 1960. The old German legend about the cliff named Lorelei and the mermaid, who lived at that cliff and caused lots of shipwrecks while singing and attracting sailors, serves as a basis for this poem. Also the poem of Heinrich Heine called “Lorelei” provides the basis for Plath's poem, because Heine's poem, written in 1824, is a reason why this legend is so well-known worldwide; this German poem made the legend popular. Thus, this work might be considered as a rewriting of existing narrative.

The poem consists of 12 stanzas; in the very first one Plath describes the night which is beautiful; her speaker has some suicidal intentions, although in this poem they are declined in the first line: “It is no night to drown in” (Plath 94). She speaks very calmly about the view - how fishermen are sleeping and castles' turrets are reflected in water. But then the stillness is distorted by certain “shapes” moving toward the speaker - those are mermaids, singing beautifully. She describes their limbs as “ponderous” and hair as “heavier than sculptures marble”, and it creates a feeling that they move rather slow. The mermaids are describes as if they were statues - neither their facial expressions nor emotions are talked about; they seem like something not belonging to that world, something not real and almost non-existent. “They sing of a world more full and clear than can be” - this line proves that they do not belong to this world, but to another one, which is better.

Then the speaker describes the feelings caused by singing: mermaids are “promising sure harborage” after the nightmare, when they keep silent it is worse for the speaker to hear than their singing. The speaker is sure that their world is better than hers, because she does not like the political system of hers: “Here, in a well-steered country, under a balanced ruler”, which is definitely ironic, because afterwards she puts “you lodge on the pitched reefs of nightmare”, the last word refers to the speaker's world. Also the mermaids are kind of fighting patriarchy - because what they do is sing in the cliffs and allure sailor so that their ships crash into cliffs. The speaker calls the mermaids “sisters”, which creates a special bond between them and shows her affection, and admires them for fighting patriarchy by charming sailors and then making them drown. Thus, it can be concluded that the world she lives in is patriarchal, and the speaker does not like it also: “Beyond the mundane order, your voices lay siege”. The mentioned mundane order might refer to patriarchy, which the mermaids are fighting. In the end, the speaker wants to join them in their world: “Stone, stone, ferry me down there”.

Moreover, the poem is full of references to German culture. First of all, the legend itself was originated in Germany. Secondly, the remark about the country being “under a balanced ruler” might refer to Germany during the ruling time of Hitler; that is also why the speaker is not fond of a world she lives in. As it was already proved above, references to German culture in Plath's poetry are always explained by her complicated relationship with her father, who was German. Thus, regarding those two abovementioned interpretations of the lines “under the balances ruler” and “mundane order”, I can claim that Plath gives the same status to patriarchy as to fascism.

Taking the analysis into consideration, it is possible to draw the following conclusion. Firstly, in this poem, Plath makes a reference to her own biography by including German culture into it. She refers to her own unpleasant experience, because the described in the poem world is hideous, it is ruled by “a balanced ruler” who is proved to be Hitler and to symbolize her German father. Secondly, she uses the following images -- the juxtaposition of mermaid's ideal world and her hideous one; and the second image might be interpreted as if her hideous world had two features: fascism and patriarchy, which in the poem are equivalent. Thus, she exaggerates the unpleasant memory about her father and in the poem, Plath refers to it using an image of fascist dictator. Thirdly, her speaker wants to escape from this world, and this desire symbolizes Plath's own desire to escape the unpleasant memory about her father; and the speaker finds a strategy to do that: she wants to join the mermaids under water.

In this poem, the revisionist mythmaking is one of the most important techniques. Plath takes an image of mythical creatures very well-known for being dangerous to sailors, because they used to drown while hypnotized by wonderful voices; and she transforms this image into feministic symbol admired by herself. However, what she does is different from what Sexton does in “Transformations”: Plath does not change the connotation of the mermaid image, she changes the context around. In Heinrich Heine's poem, two people are described - the mermaid and the sailor who drowns because of her song: “The loveliest maiden is sitting up there, so wondrously fair”, “The boatman aboard his small skiff, enraptured with a wild ache”. In Heine's poem, Lorelei is a singular creature, and there is only one drowned sailor; in Plath's, first of all, there are several mermaids, secondly, they become a symbol of feminism, fighting not a single one man, but the whole patriarchy.

Thus, that is how the revisionist mythmaking works in Plath's poem: the poetess takes an existing mythical image, does not transform it and puts political context around it, so that it becomes feministic.

Now I will move on to analyzing Maxine Kumin's poetry from a feminist prospection. It is also quite important to take a look at the poetry of Kumin, because although she has been grouped with other confessional poets, in her poetry confession differs.

Kumin got a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her volume “Up Country” in 1973. She had a close friendship with Anne Sexton; they were not only friends, but also writing pals. As Kumin puts in the interview of 1996, they both used to write together, even though they were in different places: “So we would start working, and call one another up and put the phone down on the desk and then whistle into it when we had something to say” (Shomer 532). The poetesses spent much time together: “We got together frequently. And out kids got together. They were pretty much the same age” (Shomer 532). Speaking of their influence on each other, Kumin admits the presence of it and says that they both were in the same workshop while she was writing “Halfway” and Sexton was writing “To Bedlam and Part Way Back”: “There we were, writing away at white heat, critiquing poems that were the spine of our books. We met every other week at each other's houses”. At the workshop, there were other poets like George Starbuck.

In that interview, Kumin also admits that she was influences by Robert Lowell as well: “I think we all learned from Robert Lowell that lines can be uneven and you can play with rhyme” (Shomer 533). However, the influence made by Sexton can be seen in a number of poems, and it works the other way round: because of their habit of working together and close friendship, Sexton was also influenced by Kumin. Speaking of which, it is reasonable to take a look at one poem that belongs to the volume “Halfway” and is called “Fräulein Reads Instructive Rhymes”.

In this poem, published in 1961, Kumin performs a method similar to the one Sexton used in her volume “Transformations” later in 1971: she takes a well-known children's story and emphasizes what a horrible meaning it can carry. Kumin took the plot from Heinrich Hoffmann's “Der Struwwelpeter” (a volume of humorous poems for children); she did not change it as Sexton did, although Kumin in her poem retells that plot in her own words and bases another plot on it.

The original story by H. Hoffman has a clear moral and teaches children that misbehavior can bring poor consequences in an exaggerated way - for instance, one of his characters, a girl Harriet, used to play with the matches, and eventually burnt down the house and died in a fire herself. The story is told in a humorous and unrealistic way: “And when the good cats sat beside the smoking ashes, how they cried!” (Kumin 17). Kumin takes some of those narratives and uses them in her poems as a base: those stories about children misbehaving and experiencing horrible consequences are told by a mother to her child in Kumin's poems.

Thus, by adding a new character she changes the mode completely: the original volume is absurd but with a certain moral; on the other hand, her poem is ironic, and the irony is meant to be towards the moral that the original has - the same effect Sexton reaches in “Transformations”. Kumin mocks the mother, “Fraulein”, who scares her child with those horrible stories. The irony is very clear in the following cases: after telling a story full of realistic details (“Now we must bury him. In the black earth he's meek”) of a child who dies of hunger, Fraulein says “Eat what I fix for you. See what can happen?”. “Children should be meek” is exactly H. Hoffman's moral; and in Kumin's poem that word is used to describe a dead child. Thus, the strategy Maxine Kumin performs here is taking an existing narrative and in an ironic way revealing how horrid actually are those children's stories, and the same strategy is later used by Anne Sexton in “Transformations” - although it does not carry a feministic connotation.

2.3 Maxine Kumin: moving from confession to elegy

Speaking of the main methods of Kumin's poetry, I should take a look on some reviews. In his review of the volume “Selected poems of 1960-1990”, B.A. St. Andrews writes that Maxine Kumin has created a new dimension connecting nature and mankind in her poems. Philip Booth who wrote another work, “Review of `The Retrieval System' by Maxine Kumin”, claims that this volume is not a breakthrough; although Kumin in the volume has done her best and mastered the following features that he finds the greatest in her poetry - “resonant language, autobiographical immediacy, unsystematized intelligence, radical compassion” (Booth 18). Booth does not say that in this volume Kumin's poems are necessarily confessional, he is of the opinion that they are more of the memorial kind, for example like “Splitting Wood at Six Above”. On the other hand, Kumin's characters are in pain, they suffer - but the author of the article says that suffering does not need to be confessed so that people validate it. Thus, in the volume “The Retrieval System” Maxine Kumin rather is being grateful for the past and watches how it passes by than confesses.

This mentioned poem, “Splitting Wood at Six Above”, the speaker while splitting trees reflects of her friend who passed away 4 months ago: “You are four months dead” (Kumin 76). She perceives the process of splitting as the process of releasing the souls of trees up to the air: “The papery soul of the beech released by wedge and hammer flies back into air”. While recalling her friend's death, she does not whine or cry - does not express any emotions at all; she gives the same status both to human death and to splitting the tree: “Time will do this as fair to hickory, birch, black oak, easing the insects in till rot and freeze combine to raise out of wormwood cracks, blue and dainty, the souls”. The descriptions of nature are put right beside thoughts of death - these notions are closely connected in Kumin's poetry.

Speaking about the motifs in her poetry, the author of the article points out the connection between the motif of inevitable death and another motif of the linked existence mankind and nature. The following quote proves it: “Fact: it is people who fade, it is animals that retrieve them” (Kumin 92). According to Booth, Kumin does not try to find or invent methods of escaping death; she rather accepts it peacefully as a plain fact. One of the foreground emotions shown in her poems is sweet sorrow: that is how she shows her readers that it is possible not to have any strong negative emotions and to survive tragedy and grief. For instance, in the poem “The Retrieval System” that was already mentioned, Kumin talks about possible ways of surviving death of close people, and one of them is linking them to domestic animals - that is what her speaker does in order to survive pain: “The sister who died at three has my cat's faint chin, my cat's inscrutable squint, and cried catlike in pain”.

Maxine Kumin's poems are based on death, and according to her life of every human is also based on death. For example, Kumin writes the following about her child in one of her poems: “The truth is no matter how I love her, Death blew up my dress that day while she was in the egg unconsidered (Sunbathing on a Rooftop in Berkeley)”. Even before her daughter was born, Kumin had already accepted the fact of her death that would definitely take place in future.

Basing my argument on existing research, I can claim that in her poems Maxine Kumin retrospectively talks about pain, reflects upon it and introduces the ways of dealing with grief and transforming it into sweet sorrow. The main ones of those ways are remembering, respecting the past and linking it with present; and the other one it appreciating nature, because nature unlike people does not ever fade and can serve for bringing back the memories. As mentioned in existing research, the mode of Kumin's poems is not exactly confessional but more memorial.

Thus, in her poems, Kumin does not concentrate on some shameful occurrence from the past and does not explore her own negative feelings - on the contrary, she introduces the ways of dealing with negative feelings, which help to transform grief into sweet sorrow. Kumin steps out of confessional mode and writes not confessions, but elegies, because she recalls the memories of people close to her who are dead, for example, in the following poems: “The Retrieval System”, “Progress Report”, “The Envelope”, “Splitting Wood at Six Above”. She still confesses, for example, in a lot of poems, she refers to Anne Sexton and her early death; however, her confession is not spontaneous, as the ones of Lowell and Plath, but very well thought-through and reflected upon. The poetess confesses not about the fact that she is in pain, like other confessional poets do - but about the fact that she has no more pain, she has overcome it - only the sweet sorrow is left.

Conclusion

In the present paper, the following objectives were completed.

First of all, the definition of confessional poetry, according to M. Rosenthal, was drawn. Then, regarding that definition, the poetry of the first confessional poet Robert Lowell was analyzed and the differences between his mode of writing and those of other earlier authors like Keats and Whitman were pointed out. Afterwards, the status of confession in society, the roots and effects of it were defined. The following claim was made: confession is a ritual of producing truth, which should be conveyed between two sides, the confessing one and the authority, and as a result of this interaction the truth is produced. Then, Robert Lowell's poetry was analyzed in order to find out, what is confessional truth in it. It is proved that Lowell used made-up facts as a basis for him poems - he has said it several times in different abovementioned interviews. He did it for victimizing his speaker, so that his readers could feel pity for him and perceive him as a suffering hero of the time. Lowell deviated the actual truth about himself in order to write poems. Thus, keeping in mind the definition of confession given by Foucault, it was possible to claim that Lowell's confessional truth, produced as a result of writing, consists of deviated actual truth and his audience's trust in it.

Moving on to Sylvia Plath's poetry, it was claimed that, in accordance with existing research, Plath used autobiographical facts as a basis for poems, however, she used them not in a plain form, but she used hyperbole as a device in order to introduce these facts in a poem. Thus, the actual truth was also deviated by Plath, but already in the poem - she uses hyperboles as devices for creating poetry. Thus, her confessional truth is created in the poem by using hyperboles.

Afterwards, I moved to another significant confessional poet Anne Sexton and her volume “Transformations”. Here I approached the article by Alicia Ostriker “Thieves of Language: Women Poets and Revisionist Mythmaking”, that is about the need for female poets to create their own language instead of using the oppressor's one. In the article, one of the methods of doing it is introduced, and this method is revisionist mythmaking, that means taking an existing in patriarchal culture narrative and transforming it into feministic. That is what Anne Sexton performed in her volume “Transformations”: she took existing fairy tales and rewrote them. The methods she used in rewriting and making the plots feministic are the following: firstly, she exaggerated all the qualities proclaimed to be good for archetypical females in original tales, thus, made her heroines look and behave very unnaturally, literally like dolls; then, she created a collective “we” for her readers, all the women who were ready to mock the tales and the female archetypes with her; at the very end of the volume, in the last poem, the switch between describing an archetype by the speaker and the start of speaker's confession occurs, and the collective “we” turns into confessional “I”. Here the fairy tale ends and the reality begins, because the speaker turns out to be the girl who is raped by her father and who tries to escape from it in fantasies about fairy tales. In was also proven by existing research, that image of incest in Sexton poetry refers not to actual rape, but to yearning for acceptance from male authority. That is Sexton's confessional truth - she confesses about her seeking for acceptance using an image of incest.

The overall technique Sexton uses in the poem is similar to Lowell's one: she victimizes her speaker, so that the audience feels pity for her; also at the end of the poem, she makes the distance between the speaker and the audience shorter, changing the description of archetype to confessional mode, thus, making the contrast between the tale and severe reality way stronger. Thus, the confessional truth in Sexton's volume “Transformations” works out for making its feministic and political impulse stronger.

Then, regarding the notion of revisionist mythmaking, I analyzed Sylvia Plath's poem “Lorelei”. She uses the same method as Sexton does of taking an existing in patriarchal culture image and making it feministic. However, Plath uses another technique of performing it: she does not change the image itself, only transforms the context around it in order to make it feministic.

Afterwards, I moved on to analyzing Maxine Kumin's poetry and identifying its mode. According to one of the reviews of her volumes, her poetry of more of memorial mode than of confessional one. I agree with that claim and also add, that regarding all the features of her poetry, it is possible to call her poems elegies.

Thus, keeping in mind the conclusion, I can claim that the aim of the paper was reached. It was proven that in the works of confessional poets, different kinds of confessional truth are present, and these kinds of confessional truth are used by them for achieving certain effects they want to achieve in their poetry - for instance, with the usage of confessional truth feministic and political effects are created in Sexton's volume.

After making a conclusion, it is possible to state, that the topic of confessional truth and the ways it is used in poetry for creating certain effects was covered in the present paper. However, there is room for further research, particularly in the field of the further changes occurring within the mode of confessional poetry, and the changes of confessional truth depending on them.

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