Melancholia and the bomb: Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and the fragmented atomic psyche

Abstract

This essay examines how the confessional poetry of Robert Lowell and Anne Sexton responded to the management of psychological and affective responses to the nuclear age. The cultural Cold War worked tirelessly to justify nuclear proliferation in the name of maintaining sovereignty against the communist other, naturalized atomic culture by propagating the technological and commercial potential of nuclear futures and appeased anxiety through the emergence of powerful psychological, biopolitical and technological institutions. By focusing on the ideological management of affect in the aftermath of atomic ruins, the confessional poetry of Lowell and Sexton reveals the psychological toll that nuclear rhetoric had on American lives.