Sentimentality

Its hard for anyone, not just poets to avoid or minimize the state of being sentimental when he/she write about personal experiences and write confessions about their past life, especially if this confession or experiences carry painful memories. Moreover, it’s a human nature to be sentimental when someone remembers death and dead loved one. Some people cry, other hold their tears in their eyes forever, and some write it down and try to let the paper hold these painful memories instead of their minds.

In fact, sentimentality is a the a factor in some of this weeks poems that put them together. Some poets used it in a way that makes the reader relate to them and feel what they feel and it seemed like a massage that tells the reader to feel sorry for them. Fro example, Sylvia Plath wrote about her depression and how it made her try to kill herself. Some readers will think she was exaggerating when she said “Nevertheless, I am the same, identical woman. The first time it happened I was ten. It was an accident.” and “The second time I meant. To last it out and not come back at all. I rocked shut”. In fact Plath fell in the trap of writing with sentimentality in this poem.

On the other hand, Anne Sexton was successful in avoiding sentimentality even though she went through a lot of painful experiences in her life. For example, in her poems "And One for My Dame" and "The Truth the Dead Know", Anne Sexton was not sentimental when she wrote about the death of someone else. The death of her parents. She wrote the poems with pure feelings to let the reader know why she reached such a high state of depression and how the death of her parents affected her life, without letting her emotions govern her writing like Plath, and did not write with sentimentality.