Shattering Silence: Plath and Sexton’s Radical Poetics of the Sublime and Grotesque

This study examines how Sylvia Plath and Anne Seton shattered literary and cultural silence through their radical reworking of the sublime and grotesque to articulate female experiences in mid-20th-century America. Drawing on theorists such as Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant,Julia Kristeva, and Mikhail Bakhtin. The analysis explores how these poets transformed deeply personal trauma intoa feminist acts of resistance. Through close readings of over twenty poems, alongside archival materials, this paper reveals how Plath's metaphysical sublime in Ariel and Saxten's grotesque distortions in Transformations subvert traditional narratives of femininity, mental illness, and the female body. Both poets challenge patriarchal norms through the deliberate repurposing of male-dominated aesthetics.