anne sexton wrote about birth and abortion and celebrated her uterus, she pondered suicide.i mean, that's not john keats or elizabeth barrett browning or that whole earlier generation. i mean, how do you explain that? >> by the time that plath and robert lowell and anne sexton were writing these poems, which was pretty much middle of the century, into the '60s and the '70s, a lot of things have happened. and first of all, we had two world wars. one to end all wars, and then a war that, you know, came after that, which was beyond human imagination in terms of its cruelty. its organized cruelty in terms of the holocaust. so a lot of these incredible ideals that we had about human nature were being battered on all sides. and also interiorly because psychoanalysts began to come up, people began to realize that we aren't even in control of who we are inside of ourselves. with all of that having occurred, by the time we hit the '50s, we're trying desperately to recover from the second world war and to say, "everything's wonderful and good and we have chevrolets and, you know, we'v