The existence of savagery in civilized society is one of the predominant themes of both Oates's poetry and fiction. In all of her works, social form becomes merely a disguise for the undercurrents of psychological, and often physical, brutality. Since the publication of these stories (followed in 1964 by her first novel,
With Shuddering Fall), Oates's critical acclaim has grown steadily. At the age of forty-two she is one of the premier women writers in America, and her productivity has shown no sign of diminishing.
Throughout Oates's poetry the struggle to maintain the identity of the self is associated with domination of women by men. Men define women, and the attempt of women to escape this imposed definition leads to love affairs that are more often psychological warfare. Her poems, short lyrics told in a confessional mode, are outbursts of the inner self against the pressure of relationships that threaten to consume it. They are intensely personal insights seeking a public language that will allow the self to maintain its wholeness in a chaotic and demeaning world.
Oates's first volume of poetry, Anonymous Sins and Other Poems, did not attract much attention when it first appeared in 1969, although Robert French remarked that "the volume is charged with a nervous excitement that draws the reader irresistibly into its fictions." As seems to be common in the consideration of novelist-poets, critics tend to regard Oates's poetry in terms of her previous works of fiction.
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