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Abstract

This paper aims to explore how Sharon Olds’s poetry focuses on the eroticism and the body, deconstructing the taboo in American Puritan culture. The erotic nature in her poems pervades over the poetic landscape; the poet scandalously eroticizes the bodies of children and parents, genitals, and describes the sex act with explicit attention in order to show ‘the transgression’ and ‘surpassing the limit’ in American literary convention. Olds’s erotic poems reveal that terror and embarrassment at the body is an essential symptom of puritanism, which permeates into American (un)consciousness and culture. Representing the overtly sexual nature of poetry, Olds’s poems present a more aggressive challenge to the dualistic separation of the body from the mind. Moreover, The notion of erotic possibility, extremely important in her oeuvre, seems to serve as a means of reflecting on the emotional wounds of childhood days, overcoming the psychological damage, and recreating the philosophical thoughts of life. This paper ultimately argues that the power of Olds’s poetry lies on shattering literary convention and taboo in the most revolutionary ways; the vulgar and the sophisticated, the ugly and the beautiful terms swim in the same water of poetic language.