Confessional Poetry of Anne Sexton and Kamala Das seem to follow the trajectory that starts with physicality and turns towards spirituality. Sexton, one of the most versatile poet of the confessional genre, writing during the later part of the 20th century shook up the literary world by her candid confessions that dealt with various aspects of her physicality, which included various taboo topics like sex, incest, abortions, menstruation, childbirth, mental illness, hysteria, experience of mental asylum and so on. Kamala Das, the controversial Indian poet writing in English, who was also a contemporary of Anne Sexton, has forged a similar journey beginning with stark and bare truths about a woman’s physicality, and later turned towards God, specially Krishna. After her conversion to Islam in 1999, she also wrote some poems devoted to Allah.

Being confessional poets, their poetry runs parallel to the journey of their tumultuous lives. Kamala Das, who was continuously in search of an identity and meaning in her life, found poetry as an anchor and started writing fiercely frank and brutally honest narrative that mirrored her personal experiences. These poets have been read mainly as confessional poets who removed the mask of the poet and “bared it all”. In the poetic as well as personal journey, Das and Sexton during the later phase gradually turned towards spirituality, realizing that the ultimate salvation and freedom from all pain is to be found in the mystic side of life. Sexton’s eighth collection of poems, The Awful Rowing towards God published posthumously in 1975 shows this shift towards the ultimate ‘Truth’, when she wishes to leave the world and move towards God. The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter." This gave the poet the desire and will power to continue living and writing. The poems in this volume express her desire and anxiety to know what lies beyond this physical world. Kamala Das too tries to escape the pain of the physicality by forgetting everything in the presence of Krishna, her God.

In the Second half of the twentieth Century a group of American poets started writing Confessional poetry which is a highly subjective poetry that boldly unmasks the persona of the poet. This style of writing emerged in the late 1950s and early 1960s and is associated with poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and W. D. Snodgrass, Allen Ginsberg. Lowell’s book Life Studies was a frank and candid expression of an account of his life and familial ties and had a significant impact on American poetry, and he is considered to be the pioneer of Confessional Poetry. Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton were both students of Lowell and noted that his work influenced their writing. Anne Sexton, of all these confessional poets, seems to express the physicality of a woman’s life in the most naked form, stripped of all romanticized ideals. Maxine Kumin described Sexton's work: "She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry." She published seven poetry collections during her life time andn three collections of poems posthumously.

The experience of being a woman is so unique that it cannot be the same as the experience of being born a man. Anne sexton accepts this fact, and most women will share her emotions. In the poem “Consorting with Angels” she says:

I was tired of being a woman,
tired of the spoons and the post,
tired of my mouth and my breasts,
tired of the cosmetics and the silks.
             (“Consorting with Angels”)

Anne Sexton was stunningly beautiful, had immense literary talent and experienced great success as a poet during her life time. However, she perceived herself differently, and felt unloved and experienced a sense of rejection. She described herself in the book Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters as “a girl who was meant to be a boy, the unwanted third daughter…” (Sexton Linda Gray, 3) Her sense of rejection ultimately culminated in her mental illness and later she had to undergo psychiatric treatments and hospitalization. She attempted suicide many times, and in the end she was successful is her attempt. On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton's manuscript of The Awful Rowing toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975 (Middlebrook 396). “On returning home she put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, ending her life by carbon monoxide poisoning” ( Hendin 258).

In the “Double Image” Anne Sexton talks about her suicide attempt:

Death was simpler than I’d thought.
The day life made you well and whole
I let the witches take away my guilty soul.
I pretended I was dead
until the white men pumped the poison out,
putting me armless and washed through the rigmarole
of talking boxes and the electric bed.
           (“Double Image”)

In her poetry she frankly analyses the physical and psychological manifestations of her mental illness. Her first book To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) is a collection of poems she wrote shortly after her confinement in the mental hospital. The poems “You, Doctor Martin”, “Music Swims Back to Me” and Ringing the Bell” are some of the poems that relate to her experience in the mental asylum. In “You, Doctor Martin” Anne Sexton refers to the doctor as … and the hospital as a summer hotel:

You, Doctor Martin, walk
from breakfast to madness. Late August,
I speed through the antiseptic tunnel
where the moving dead still talk
of pushing their bones against the thrust
of cure. And I am queen of this summer
hotel or the laughing bee on a stalk
of death.
            (“You, Doctor Martin")

The physical aspect of the treatment is fully explored in this poem and the other poems of the early phase of Anne sexton’s poetry. She does not sentimentalize her situation, nor is there any shedding of tears or dejection. It is a stoic acceptance of the situation.

The other physical experiences of life are not ignored by Anne Sexton. Without any self-consciousness, Sexton writes about her mother’s operation of cancer:

After the sweet promise,
the summer’s mild retreat
from mother’s cancer, the winter months of her death,
I come to this white office, its sterile sheet,
its hard tablet, its stirrups, to hold my breath
while I, who must, allow the glove its oily rape,
to hear the almost mighty doctor over me equate
my ills with hers
and decide to operate.
             (“Operation”)

In the same poem she describes her mother who is dying in the hospital, while the other women are suffering labour pains in the process of giving birth to their babies:

I soar in hostile air
over the pure women in labor,
over the crowning heads of babies being born.
I plunge down the backstair
calling mother at the dying door

These early poems by Anne Sexton explore all physical experiences and their psychological impact on the poet. Though the poems are autobiographical, they have a universal appeal, as they are not isolated experiences of the poet alone; they are the experiences that most women go through, like childbirth, menstruation, sexual encounters, death, psychological traumas etc. Therefore these poems have a universal appeal.

Anne Sexton planned her posthumous publications with great care. She gave very specific instructions to her publisher regarding her wishes about publication dates. The first of these three volumes was The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), which represents several significant departures from her earlier poetry. As the title indicates, the poems are a departure from the physicality towards spirituality. As Sexton neared death, she became aware about God and the afterlife. In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with "two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital." She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death. Another posthumous collection The Death Notebook (1974) also reveals a great change in Sexton’s poetic exploration and a clear shift from the earlier themes related to the physical experience of a woman’s life.

The poems in these later collections are speculative in nature. They explore the individual life in relation to religion and death. The questions regarding Christianity and spirituality are baffling and most questions in her poems are asked in a kind of panic stricken tone. Perhaps, it is because she was planning her suicide all the time when she was composing these poems. She wonders if God will forgive her. Will she find paradise after death?

God went out of my fingers. 
They became stone. 
My body became a side of mutton 
and despair roamed the slaughterhouse.” 
(“The Awful Rowing Toward God”)

Sexton’s life has been a painful drama engulfed in pain, mental asylums, suicide attempts, and much more. Towards the end of her life, she is in search of peace and solace, which she expects to find after her death.

I’m mooring my rowboat
at the dock of the island called God.
This dock is made in the shape of a fish
and there are many boats moored
          (“The Rowing Endeth”)

In the collection of poems titled The Death Notebooks, Sexton speaks about, not only death, but about a higher spiritual power. Sexton uses a language that many poets would be afraid to use when addressing God, but because of her wording and structure, these poems are more moving than ever expected to be. The first poem in this book is titled, “Gods.” Though the poem is in the third person, it is still autobiographical. In their first line, she writes, “Ms. Sexton went out looking for the gods.” 

In “Faustus and I,” she says, “I am not immortal; Faustus and I are the also-ran.” This is making a small religious reference to fact that no one is immortal and that God is the highest power that we know of. The titles of the poems very clearly show a shift towards spirituality. Poems like ‘The Fury of God’s Good-bye,’ ‘Jesus Walking’, ‘Madonna’ are all inspired by the poet’s religious fervor.

The Kirkus Review of The Awful Rowing Towards God published on March 25 1975 by Houghton Mifflin sums up the Anne Sexton predicament that made her shift from physicality to spirituality:

These are last poems, last privacies, Sexton reserved for publication after her death. And since her work was, in such a complex and inextricable way, her life, it seems appropriate to give both their due and ask why she embarrassed us so, what inspired her to do it. Her poetry was hard on everyone, and the problem wasn't that it was confessional: confessionals can be swallowed if they have a modicum of originality and finesse; but Sexton's materials were, so to speak, from the public domain — the most private experiences are the most conventional and universal — and she heaped them up. Male critics winced at her technique; women squirmed (having a better sense of what she was doing and dealing with), and both resisted the identification she imposed or found themselves at a loss to talk about it. In either case the problem was the same — how to react to such a toxic concentration of female myth, hysteric and Good Girl as well as demon mother. The dense, super-vitalized environments she set up evoked the panic of being rolled up in a rug, something of what she must have felt as woman, poet, suicide — roles that overlapped and bound her. These poems are-secret and eccentric, psalms, jeremiads, rituals that bear entirely and wondrously on a made-up lore. God, finally, was her only possible companion, and He is the focus of a desperately lived metaphor. When we come to consider her poems as a manipulation of spaces and pressures received as given, her relevance extends to everyone (women will feel it first) and her import begins to come clear.

Kamala Das who was born in 1934 in a Brahmin family of Kerala in India was also writing in the confessional mode. She wrote in her mother tongue Malayalam as well as in English. Just like Anne Sexton in America, Kamala Das in India shocked the society by her uninhabited frankness in addressing the physical side of a woman’s life that is generally hidden from the public eyes. Kamala Das published many collection of poems — Summer in Calcutta (1965), The Descendants (1967), The Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), Tonight, This Savage Rite (1979) Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996) and her Malayalam volume Ya Allah (2001) which was later on translated into English by Kalim Ahmed. Her anguished assertion of liberty is available in her autobiography My Story which was originally published in Malayalam titled Ente Katha. Later, Kamala Das translated it in English in 1977.

Kamala Das started her literary journey after the independence of India. She may be called a contemporary of the American Confessional poets like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton. In India life in a newly independent yet politically disturbed nation was far from the romantic ideals of a free and democratic socialist country the people has envisaged. Though women had participated in the freedom struggle, yet they themselves were far from free in many ways. Society did not expect a woman to talk about her physical needs and experiences in the form of poetry. Numerous Goddesses are worshipped in India and an “Ideal Indian Woman” is expected to be pure, selfless, sacrificing in short, she is expected to be an embodiment of a Goddess. She is taught right from childhood to overlook the physical aspect of her life. The rebellious nature of Kamala Das did not accept the social perceptions of a woman’s life and duties. In her autobiography My Story she says:

I was born in a family of frigid women. They were all so inhibited that I was not told what would happen when a girl entered puberty. Then one day while the blood flowed between my thighs. I wept out of fear, assuming that some internal organ had ruptured and that I was going to die. Nobody had ever told me of a woman’s menstrual cycle and of her magical secretions, to prepare me for womanhood. (31)

She chose to challenge the idealized and romanticized image of the Indian women, when she voiced her concerns about her physicality, refusing to tread the trodden path. Her open and frank treatment of sexuality was frowned upon by the conservative society of India. Her first book of poems titled Summer in Calcutta created a flutter in the literary circles, because of the frank treatment of physicality in her poems. Her second book of poetry The Descendants was even more explicit in her treatment of physical aspects of love:

Gift him what makes you woman, the scent of
Long hair, the musk of sweat between the breasts,
The warm shock of menstrual blood, and all your
Endless female hungers ... (– The Looking Glass)

In her poem “Glass” she expresses the agony of a so called “pure woman”:

I went to him for half an hour
As pure woman, pure misery
Fragile glass, breaking
Crumbling…
              (1-4)

In the poem “Winter” the poet identifies her wish to love her lover blatantly. Here the poet feels the sense of physical warmth which is placed against the bitter cold of winter winds, at the core of her soul. She bluntly eulogizes her lover’s body and the rapture it offers. For her, love becomes nourishment, a greater force for her survival than for men.

It smelt of new rains and of tender
Shoots of plants- and its warmth was the warmth
Of earth groping for roots… even my
Soul, I thought, must send its roots somewhere
And, I loved his body without shame,
On winter evenings as cold winds
Chuckled against the white window-panes.
                (“Winter”, Summer in Calcutta)

Kamala Das’s poems have a trajectory towards Spirituality. She says:

Bereft of soul
My body shall be bare.
Bereft of body
My soul shall be bare.
Which would you rather have
O kind sea?
Which is the more dead
Of the two?
            (“Suicide”)

Kamala Das in the later poetic output found a shift towards spirituality. Her shift from body to soul is very apparent in these lines from “Suicide.” This poem from the collection Only the Soul Knows how to Sing (1996) belongs to her later phase of poetry, when she has realized that her final destination or salvation is to be found in the “soul” and not the “body”. She had sought love and happiness throughout her life in the physical gratification, but in the end, just like Anne Sexton, her soul sings for the electoral bliss through the union with God.

I throw the bodies out,
I cannot stand their smell.
Only the souls may enter
The vortex of sea.
Only the souls know how to sing
At the vortex of the sea.
           (“Suicide”)

Kamala Das was a Hindu, therefore her perception of God is very different from the perception of Anne Sexton. Krishna or Ghanshyam, the Hindu God is a god of love, and Das finds eternal peace in her proximity with him. Her search for perfection in love culminates in her desire to be one with the eternal power of Ghanshyam:

Ghanshyam,
You have like a koel built your nest in the arbour of my heart.
My life, until now a sleeping jungle is at last astir with music.
You lead me along a route I have never known before
But at each turn when I near you
Like a spectral flame you vanish

In the end of this poem the poet says:

Shyam O Ghanshyam
You have like a fisherman cast your net in the narrows
Of my mind
And towards you my thoughts today
Must race like enchanted fish...

In the last two collections of her poems, Kamala Das has tried to transform her search for physical love into her search for spiritual love. In her poems she presents herself fully dedicated to Ghanshyam or Lord Krishna. In other words, Kamala Das has outgrown her lust and has risen above the demands of her body, thus imparting a spiritual quality to her love. We may regard these poems as representing her spiritual evolution, or the culmination of her journey from physicality to spirituality.

Her search for spirituality as well as her personal life problems led her to convert to Islam on December 16, 1999. After her conversion she wrote one book titled Ya Allah. Kalima, the translation project of the Abu Dhabi Authority for Culture and Heritage (ADACH), published the Arabic translation of this collection of poems written by Kamala Suraiyya, the name adopted by Kamala Das after her conversion. The book, entitled The Suraiyya Resonance, contains a full collection of her poetry which had been originally published in Malayalam under the title Ya Allah.

Kamala Das’s conversion became a topic of controversy in the social and literary circles. She gave controversial statements like “I’m converting Krishna into Allah and making him the Prophet after naming him Mohammed. Leaving the religious politics aside, one can safely say that be it Krishna or be it Allah, Kamala Das’s progression from physicality to spirituality is very evident.

Her spiritual quest that began with the sentiments like:

Krishna, I am melting,
Melting, melting
Nothing remains
But you

Later on the same sentiment is expressed in the poems of “Ya Allah”, when she states—

Ya Allah
I perceive the Prophet’s features, as
yet unrevealed, on my beloved’s
mien…

The two poets, Anne Sexton and Kamala Das, raised in two different cultures, following different religions, belonging two different countries, residing in two different continents are surprisingly aligned in their poetic expressions, their personal anguish and their stylistic nuance.

Both women poets start their anguished journey of life as well as literary pursuit in a courageous manner, questioning the hypocrisy of a society that refuses to acknowledge various issues of life. Both write in the Confessional genre, and both ultimately find spirituality as the ultimate answer to all worldly problems.

Works cited:

Das, Kamala. Kamala Das: Selected Poems. New Delhi: Penguin Books, 2014. Print.

—. My Story. New Delhi: HarperCollins Publishers, 2009. Print.

—. Summer in Calcutta. Kottayam: DC Books, 2004. Print.

—. Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. Kottayam: DC Books, 1996. Print.

Hendin, Herbert "The Suicide of Anne Sexton". Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 23(3): (Fall 1993). 257–62. PMID 8249036.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: Vintage Books, 1992. Print.

Pandeya, Prabhat Kumar. “The Pink Pulsating Words: The Woman’s Voice in Kamala Das’s Poetry.” Perspectives on Kamala Das’s Poetry. Ed. Iqbal Kaur. New Delhi: Intellectual Book Corner, 2005. Print.

Sexton, Linda Gray, and Ames Lois (Eds.). Anne Sexton: A Self-portrait in Letters. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2004. Print.