ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the architecture of the American suburbs and technology that emerged in the middle decades of the twentieth century as a context for considering the domestic resonances of a poetics of surveillance. The policing of national ideology and US containment culture comes to the fore, as do emerging debates about gender, family life and modern technology. The chapter opens with an examination of the impact of post-war containment culture on the possibilities of lyric poetry by considering the extent to which US foreign policy directives shaped cultural expression of the period. The close readings focus on the poetry of Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath, and the chapter concludes with a discussion of the relevance of wiretapping to notions of confession, subjectivity and overhearing.
