Anne Sexton Essay -- Literary Analysis

Most of us accept the stories we were told as children were false, or at least romanticized. At just about point, the illusion was shattered, and Santa, the Easter Bunny and Cinderella were characters we fondly remembered. But although we recognized these figures and legends as illusions, we held on to many of the sentiments the stories, without questioning their application to adult life. Anne sexton a lot uses these innocent, childlike images juxtaposed with cynical that more receivedistic situations in order show that the les newss society teaches children, ones that children retain as adults, are illusions that do not properly illustrate the corrupt, violent world we actually blend in in.Sextons poem Cinderella, about rags to riches stories, clearly follows this pattern. First, the vocaliser tells four stories one of a plumber who wins the lottery, one of a she-goat who marries her bosss son, a milkman who makes a fortune in real estate, and a charwoman who becomes rich later a bus she was on crashes, and she collects on insurance. The progression of these stories themselves lay cynicism into the form of the poem. The speaker starts with a point about a lottery winner, which is something lucky and could be taken as the universe helping a man struggling to take cover of the twelve children. Next comes the she-goat, who does have a romantic journey too, though not quite as incidental as this lucky plumber, because she captures the oldest sons heart. The choice of the word capture could be viewed as only an idiomatic happenstance, or more possibly an implication that the speaker feels the nursemaid had some ulterior motive to love in her interactions with the son. After the nursemaid is the milkman. The milkman still has a romantic ... ...tons issue is not with people on an individual level, but instead with the society that puts them in the situations that it does. This is pregnant because it shows Sextons goal is to illuminate societys flaw s and lies sort of than those of people. Often, the lecturer cannot help but feel a bit put off after reading a collection of Anne Sextons poems. Sexton herself was disheartened with the prospect of life, killing herself at the age of 45 after years in and out of mental facilities. Her poems certainly take cynicism to an extreme, but they remain the type of extreme valuable to the literary canon. Her poetry leaves the reader questioning the world around him, now able to see stories and former(prenominal) experiences in a new glister. And although in the case of Sexton this light may be a shadow, the new depth it adds highlights to us that which we exact truly pure.