Exoteric Confession and Sad Literary Figures in Postwar America: Elizabeth Bishop, Anne Sexton, and Frank O'Hara

Abstract

This dissertation recontextualizes the meaning of confession and its relation to the public and publicity by exploring postwar American poets Elizabeth Bishop (1911–1979), Anne Sexton, (1928–1974), and Frank O’Hara (1926–1966). Because of the socially disparate elements in these poets’ lives, represented as, respectively, a reticent female recluse with childhood traumas; a distressed, white female beauty; and a gay male New Yorker whose identity is always already forbidden in a public realm, scholarly discussions tend to read them as social victims of their times whose sadness is amplified by knowledge of their personal backgrounds. This reading practice, however, disregards these poets’ roles not only as social interrogators and participants but also as highly meticulous poetic artisans by unduly highlighting and thus perpetuating their victimhood. Instead of focusing on the poets’ alleged victim mentality, I focus on a readerly appetite to hear and see the most private stories of someone else’s—the public desire that was accompanied by the everchanging notion of privacy in the postwar era. The poets, I argue, purposefully reveal their private elements to earn, rather than lose, reputations. In this regard, I argue that the poets’ public images emerge as a product of their own volitional acts as these poets construct poet-personae, which both fascinate and disturb audiences and both satisfy and shock readers’ expectations.

My project disruptively investigates how the poets embraced, rejected, disturbed, and parodied their own public images by rooting their own work in a tradition of confessional poetry, thus creating a new mode of exoteric confession, in which the poets curate their daily lives and external details in order to speak clearly to general (yet counterpublic) audiences, not only to their own insider groups or to scholars with specialist knowledge. My research recontextualizes the meaning of confession not as an authentic recording of self-flagellant musings and self-abnegations but as a “survivalist” strategy optimized for the oppressive socio-political circumstances in postwar America. My focus on the poets’ own volitional acts, through which they curated their literary selves, expands the scope of our understanding of the poets’ strategic use of emotions such as sadness, depression, and fear. Bishop, Sexton, and O’Hara deliberately render exoteric confessional modes responsive to the popular and ideological confessional culture that dominated midcentury America. The poets also interacted with the socio-political demands and rendered their voices to be known, cultivate a broader appeal, and be discussed in public spheres. In this regard, this research explicates the deliberately intended interventions by which the poets crafted their poetic and public personae and circulated them among their carefully intended readership.