SEXTON, Anne

Nationality: American. Born: Anne Gray Harvey, Newton, Massachusetts, 9 November 1928. Education: Garland Junior College, 1947-48. Family: Married Alfred M. Sexton II in 1948 (divorced 1973); two daughters. Career: Fashion model, Boston, 1950-51; teacher, Wayland High School, Massachusetts, 1967-68; lecturer in creative writing, 1970-71, and professor of creative writing, 1972-74, Boston University. Scholar, Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, 1961-63; Cranshaw Professor of Literature, Colgate University, 1972. Contributor to periodicals, including Harper's, New Yorker, Partisan Review, and Nation.Awards: Audience Poetry prize, 1958-59; Robert Frost fellowship, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 1959; Levinson prize, Poetry, 1962; American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship, 1963-64; Ford Foundation grant for year's residence with professional theater, 1964-65; first literary magazine travel grant, Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1965-66; Shelley memorial award, 1967; Pulitzer prize, 1967, for Live or Die; Guggenheim fellowship, 1969. Litt.D.: Tufts University, 1970, Regis College, 1971, and Fairfield University, 1971. Member: Royal Society of Literature (fellow); Poetry Society of America; New England Poetry Club; Phi Beta Kappa (honorary member). Died: Suicide, 4 October 1974.

Publication

Poetry

To Bedlam and Part Way Back. 1960.

All My Pretty Ones. 1962.

Selected Poems. 1964.

Live or Die. 1966.

Poems, with Thomas Kinsella and Douglas Livingstone. 1968.

Love Poems. 1969.

Transformations. 1971.

The Book of Folly. 1972.

O Ye Tongues. 1973.

The Death Notebooks. 1974.

The Awful Rowing toward God. 1975.

The Heart of Anne Sexton's Poetry (3 vols.; includes All My Pretty Ones, Live or Die, Love Poems ). 1977.

Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories. 1978.

Complete Poems, 1981. 1981.

Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. 1988.

Love Poems of Anne Sexton. 1989.

Play

43 Mercy Street (produced New York, 1969). 1976.

Other

Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters (correspondence). 1977.

No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose. 1985.

Other (for children)

Eggs of Things, with Maxine W. Kumin. 1963.

More Eggs of Things, with Kumin. 1964.

Joey and the Birthday Present, with Kumin. 1971.

The Wizard's Tears, with Kumin. 1975.

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Media Adaptation:

… about Anne (stage production), 1986, from a compilation of Sexton's poems.

Critical Studies:

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide by Cameron Northouse and Thomas P. Walsh, 1974; Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics, edited by J. D. McClatchy, 1978; "Seeking the Exit or the Home: Poetry and Salvation in the Career of Anne Sexton" by Suzanne Juhasz, in Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 1979; "The Hungry Beast Rowing toward God: Anne Sexton's Later Religious Poetry" by Kathleen L. Nichols, in NMAL, 3, 1979; "Housewife into Poet: The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton," in New England Quarterly, 56(4), December 1983, pp. 483-503, and Anne Sexton: A Biography, 1991, both by Diane Wood Middlebrook; "Anne Sexton's Suicide Poems," in Journal of Popular Culture, 18(2), Fall 1984, pp. 17-31, "How We Danced: Anne Sexton on Fathers and Daughters," in Women's Studies, 12(2), 1986, pp. 179-202, and Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton, 1987, all by Diana Hume George; "Anne Sexton Remembered" by Maryel F. Locke, in Rossetti to Sexton: Six Women Poets at Texas, edited by Dave Oliphant, 1992; Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton by Linda Gray Sexton, 1994; Anne Sexton by S. L. Berry, 1997.

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Anne Sexton is known as a "confessional poet," a term coined in the 1960s to describe a half dozen American poets (mostly male) who seemed to put more of their private lives into their poems than was customary at the time. Her work is also, as Alicia Ostriker noted in Stealing the Language: The Emergence of Women's Poetry in America, an important part of a body of poetry by women that emerged in the early 1960s, poetry that "illuminates the condition of women and therefore of humanity in an unprecedented way." Sexton wrote of her body ("In Celebration of My Uterus," "Menstruation at Forty") and of intimate female experience (abortion, masturbation) and situations ("Housewife," "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife"). She explored motherhood (often subversively), female sexuality, anger, and submission and, above all, breakdown, madness (To Bedlam and Part Way Back was her first collection, and the theme continued), the longing for death, and, especially in her last work, a longing for God the Father and his divine Son. Why, then, would Sexton, a New England WASP to boot, be included in a reference guide to literature on the Holocaust?

The answer lies in the poet's intense experience of evil and in the way she represented it in her poems. Evil was first felt as inner. One need not know that Sexton killed herself at the age of 46 to see that she sporadically, but increasingly, felt herself to be unworthy, crazy, bad. In Sexton, as in other women poets of the time, anger against the traditional condition of women, supposedly happy as procreators not creators, was often turned back against the self. Sometimes in earlier work, like the famous "Her Kind," she defiantly affirmed her status as "not a woman, quite"—"a possessed witch." Later, in "Loving the Killer," she saw herself as needing and loving the man who killed her; it is significant that she called him "my Nazi,/with your S.S. sky-blue eye." (Seven years earlier, in "The House," World War II in her family merely meant "rationed gas for all three cars.") In her last books self-destructive desire is accompanied by a proliferation of images suggesting inner evil ("the rat inside of me," "a bellyful of dirt," a "dead heart") and by multiple allusions to the Holocaust, signifying the evil both outside and within, public and private. In the posthumously published "Uses" she imagined and identified with the Jewish speaker, whose father was gassed, whose "Mama died in the medical experiments/they had stuffed a pig into her womb." (Note how the killing and violation of Jews is here associated with male violation of women.)

At the same time Sexton's poetry came to focus more and more on a difficult religious quest. In "Hurry Up Please It's Time" (The Death Notebooks ), where Ms. Dog (clearly Sexton but also perhaps "God" spelled backwards) struggles with God, her mother "sent away my kitty/to be fried in the camps." In "For Mr. Death Who Stands with His Door Open" (The Death Notebooks ), time itself is a "Nazi Mama with her beer and sauerkraut." In The Awful Rowing toward God , a collection written in two and a half weeks, whose religious passion "swept [her] up" and whose galleys she proofread the very day she committed suicide, Sexton produced what is arguably the most moving Holocaust poem in the English language: "After Auschwitz."

If the themes of Sexton's poetry are desperately serious, the poems are written in familiar American English ("Ms. Dog" and "Mr. Death" are typical), often close to ordinary speech. They are full of the objects of material culture (toilet seats, coffee mugs, Coke, frozen haddock) and names from popular culture (Joe DiMaggio, Skeezix, Long John Nebel), and they are often quite funny—sometimes savagely ironic, sometimes darkly funny, and sometimes just funny. Paradoxically, while her early verse may be the most "confessional," it often uses regular meters, rhymes, and is closer to the American academic poetry fashionable in the 1950s than to, say, the poetic experiments of Paul Celan . Yet as her poetry became more grounded in general myth, beginning with Transformations (the 1971 collection in which she retold Grimm's fairy tales), it became looser in form. The 10 wonderful "Psalms" in The Death Notebooks use the long free lines of the King James Bible and of the mad eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, whom she imagined as a kind of twin. The Awful Rowing toward God is in free verse. Sexton increasingly appears as a highly original religious poet, very American, who found a way to write like a woman and who found in the Holocaust objective signs of her own sense of evil.

—David Ball

See the essay on The Awful Rowing toward God.