?My Sweeney, Mr. Eliot?: Anne Sexton and the ?Impersonal theory of Poetry?

JL he American poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974), although routinely categorized as a poet ? indeed as mother or High-Priestess of mode ? infrequently used epithet, preferring term personal.2 As she explains: my poetry is very personal. don't think write public poems. write very poems and I was writing poetry, often about subject of madness. 3 Sexton's appropriation of adjective personal in preference to more usual confes? sional sends a number of important messages. It signals her unease with confessional mode as then defined, and her sense that label is an inadequate descriptor of her own complex and sophisticated poetics. In identifying her work as personal, Sexton stakes an ambitious claim to a particular position in wider contemporary debates about nature and purpose of poetry. Spe? cifically, she defines her writing in terms of its difference from ? which is also, as we shall see, its relationship with ? poetry of impersonality championed by T.S. Eliot and still, arguably, dominant in American literature in period when she was writing. Sexton's defiant defense of personal and private invokes and challenges Eliot's persistently influential dictum: his advocacy ofthe process of depersonalization and his admonition that there should be a complete separation between the man who suffers and mind which creates.4 Her choice of adjective signals her willingness to engage with Eliot's writing, to examine barriers which are thought to