Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

peaceful, and fear the concept of emotional connection with others, such as the rejection of

flowers and the rejection of blood, symbolizing love to the heart.

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath both are renowned autobiographical poets. It is rare to find a

rhythmic sequence, or a poetic structural technique, with the majority of their poems being free

verse. The poems were forms of their personal expression, not for reader’s enjoyment.

However, although the shape and structure of their poems may seem to be random, the free

verse structure is also a metaphor for their dysfunctional lives and mental state.

The role of the speaker of any poem is essential to its understanding and meaning. In both,

Plath and Sexton’s poems, the speakers are feminine, and usually strong. Their chosen speaker,

is not them, but a representation of them, often exaggerated for poetic reasons. However, the

connections between the speaker and either Plath or Sexton are strikingly similar. In both cases,

the speaker embodies the views, opinion and history of the poets to tell the story. Many of

Plath’s and Sexton’s poems were extracts from their diaries, as personal poems later on

published. Their poems, it would seem, were a form of escape and a space for them to express

and resolve their anguish.

Plath and Sexton alike, personify death and suicide and both refer to these as the enemy, who

is eating them up inside and destroying their life. The linkage of death to a person or thing with

characteristics and traits is perhaps a coping mechanism for both, or an allusion to them of

what is happening, distracting themselves from the fact a “feeling” is taking over them. It

makes it easier to comprehend when the feeling is given power and personified, which perhaps

calms Sexton and Plath from feeling the deep insanity which surrounded suicidal and depressed

patients in the 1930s. In Wanting to Die , Sexton quotes “Twice I have so simply declared