Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Diana Hume George

SOURCE: "Is It True? Feeding, Feces, and Creativity in Anne Sexton's Poetry," in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 68, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 357-71.

In the following essay, George explores the psychoanalytic significance of infant feeding, nurturance, and excretion in Sexton's poetry, especially as evident in O Ye Tongues. According to George, "In her version of the emergence of poetic consciousness, the infant's ambivalent attachment to feces becomes a metaphor for fertilization of the imagination and for the creation of a sustaining self."

This is an essay on beginnings and endings, feces and fruit, in the poetry of Anne Sexton. I will end it in the place of specifically female grace made accessible by Stephanie Demetrakopoulos' mediation, "The Nursing Mother and Feminine Metaphysics." But I begin earlier in the feeding cycle, at a moment that is by its nature far less graceful. The extremities in Anne Sexton's poetry might...
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