Revisiting Sylvia Plath’s and Anne Sexton’s confessional poetry: Analyzing stylistic differences and evolution of poetic voice(s) through computational text analysis

Abstract This paper proposes a new approach to reading the ‘Confessional Poetry’ of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton by combining quantitative text analysis methods with a qualitative literary interpretation. We investigate the meanings of stylistic differences between Plath’s and Sexton’s poems and highlight their differences in using pronouns and related sentiment words. Our data-focused research demonstrates that Plath employs rather fragmented and schizophrenic styles, as well as poetic voices with word choices that present dynamic and volatile emotions. On the other hand, Sexton’s poetic voice is causal, homogeneous, and relatively stable, focusing a lot on domestic issues and the symbolic function of father. To illustrate this, three computational methods are used: (1) linking pronoun uses in each poet’s work to sentiment words (Figs 1 and 2), (2) a topic-model analysis to compare Plath’s and Sexton’s works to see how the themes of poetry are manifested by the different patterns of word use, the so-called topics, and their co-occurrences in the poems (Figs 3 and 4), and (3) a diachronic analysis of each poet’s works (using the topic model) to identify the thematic changes (Figs 5 and 6). The methods commonly testify one of the widely accepted ideas regarding Plath’s and Sexton’s confessional poems. Plath often breaks with the boundary of the ego, I, through complex reciprocity between I and other pronoun groups, while Sexton evokes the presence of the poet through more stable and less kinetic voices of the authorial I. Plath’s and Sexton’s works have long been regarded as the passive products of biological reductionism due to the traditional way of understanding the confessional genre. The aim of this paper, however, is to redefine the meaning of confessional genre, proposing that the truthfulness of the poetic voice I cannot be seperated from the stylistic issues in poetic language.