Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Confessional poetry, or poetry that takes the personal experiences of the poet as the subject, often examining fraught subjects like sex, gender, trauma, depression, and others, emerged in the late 1950s and continued as a key poetic school in the 1960s. As one of the prominent figures of the movement, Sexton’s poetry closely examined her experiences not only of mental health, but of sexism and the weight of the cultural patriarchy. While “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” is not explicitly confessional and came about after the heyday of confessional poetry, readers can still find the poetic values that undergirded Sexton’s writing until her death, as she takes to task the American culture's expectation of female submissiveness, sexual purity, and deference to men.

The editors at the Poetry Foundation point out:

Although the original confessional poets were all white, middle- or upper-class, and heterosexual, their insistence that trauma and—in the case of poets such as Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath—painful realities of gender and patriarchy were not simply subjects worthy of poems but also experiences that altered the very conditions of poetry have inspired countless others (“An Introduction to Confessional Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry Foundation).