Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton (Harvey), 1928-74, American poet, b. Newton, Mass. Educated at Garland Junior College and at Radcliffe, she worked briefly as a fashion model in Boston. Her "confessional poetry" is highly autobiographical, marked by irony and lyrical emotion, and often dwells on themes of madness and death. Her first work, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), deals in personal terms with her efforts to retain her sanity. Other works include Selected Poems (1964, 1988), Live or Die (1966; Pulitzer Prize), Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1973), The Death Notebooks (1974), the posthumous The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), and The Complete Poems (1981). Sexton died at 46, an apparent suicide. Her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, is a novelist and essayist.

Bibliography: See D. W. Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991); J. D. McClatchy, ed., Anne Sexton, the Artist and Her Critics (1978); L. G. Sexton, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994).

Sexton, Anne (1928–74), American poet, was born into a privileged Massachusetts family. Following an early elopement, children, and a breakdown, she started to write poetry as therapy. She attended R. Lowell's classes with Plath, with whom she shares the use of a dramatic, apparently confessional ‘I’, and the thematic territory of family life, jealous passion, and mental illness. Her early work makes dynamic use of strict poetic form, but, from the Pulitzer Prize-winning Live or Die (1966), this is replaced by free verse which relies on dense, sometimes surreal, metaphors, wit, and rhythmic lists for impact. Her later work is increasingly haunted by a troubled relationship with God. She had particular success with her adaptation of Grimm, Transformations (1971). Collected Poems was published in 1981, Selected Poems in 1988.