The Art of Rhetoric: Aristotelian Models of Persuasion and Longinian Sublime in Sylvia Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” and Anne Sexton’s “The Truth the Dead Know”

Abstract

This study argues that Sylvia Plath's "Lady Lazarus" and Anne Sexton's "The Truth the Dead Know" constitute a radical intersection of Aristotelian rhetorical persuasion and Longinian sublimity, wherein the confessional mode becomes a site of transcendent persuasion. While Aristotle's Rhetoric systematizes persuasion through ethos, pathos, and logos, Longinus's On the Sublime theorizes language's capacity to transport, elevate, and overwhelm the audience through grandeur of thought and emotional intensity. This paper contends that Plath and Sexton enact a fusion in which rhetorical persuasion and sublime transcendence are mutually constitutive, producing a poetics that transforms private anguish into a universal meditation on mortality, trauma, and survival. Through close textual analysis, the study examines how Plath constructs a mythic ethos of invincibility, weaponizes pathos through Holocaust imagery and theatrical spectacle, and employs a deceptive logos of numerical precision and cyclical structure, all while achieving a Longinian grandeur that elevates personal suffering to the realm of the sublime. Sexton, by contrast, grounds her ethos in vulnerability and authenticity, deploys pathos through the stark juxtaposition of domestic imagery and existential dread, and structures her logos as a philosophical confrontation with death's indifference, achieving a sublime that resides not in heroic transcendence but in the terrifying clarity of grief. The paper concludes that the rhetorical-sublime synthesis in these poems offers a new framework for understanding confessional poetry as a persuasive art that does not merely express emotion but transforms it into an overwhelming force.