SEXTON, Anne

Born 2 November 1928, Newton, Massachusetts; died 4 October 1974, Weston, Massachusetts

Daughter of Ralph and Mary Staples Harvey; married Alfred M. Sexton II, 1948 (divorced); children: two daughters

Although Anne Sexton's childhood included winters with her beloved great-aunt at the spacious family residence in Weston, Massachusetts, as well as happy seaside summers in Maine, Sexton was a demanding, rebellious child who felt rejected by her upper-middle class parents. Her impulsive marriage in 1948 to Alfred Sexton weathered many years of crises before it ended in divorce in 1973. Sexton's sudden bouts of suicidal depression, which for several years necessitated separating her from her two small daughters, continued throughout her life, as did her psychiatric care in and out of mental hospitals. All of these problematic relationships form the basis of much of her poetry.

Discovering her poetic interests at age twenty-eight, this attractive housewife from the suburbs of Boston began studying under mentors such as Robert Lowell. Sexton taught at Boston University from 1970 until she took her life at the age of forty-five.

In To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Sexton probed the intensely personal terrain of madness, guilt, and loss. As she undertakes her poetic journey from madness to partial sanity, her most frequent voice is that of the helpless, dependent child searching into the past for the lost parents and the disinherited self. Her two most famous Bedlam poems, "You, Doctor Martin" and "Ringing the Bells," capture the helpless childishness of mental patients who are "like bees caught in the wrong hive." "Pushing their bones against the thrust / of cure," these "foxy children" are dependent on the godlike doctor of the "oracular / eye," who oversees the protective order of their lives. However, the bell-ringing therapy shows that this order is only the regulated passivity of patients directed by the bell-lady's commands. Like the rows of moccasins they make—"waiting on the silent shelf"—the patients are the "moving dead." Bedlam also contains numerous elegies to the beloved dead moving through the poet's memories. In two remarkable mother-daughter poems, "The Double Image" and "Division of Parts," Sexton becomes a female Oedipus investigating the "appalling truths" of identity and guilt. While many readers objected to her subject matter, the raw power of the Bedlam poetry quickly established Sexton as a new and signifi-cant "confessional" poet.

In the Pulitzer Prize-winning Live or Die (1966), religious parallels tend to universalize the dilemma of the "mad" persona; thus in "For the Year of the Insane," Sexton tries to overcome the passivity which keeps her "locked in the wrong house" but fumbling for a fragmented prayer to Mary, the "tender physician" who could heal the spiritual sickness of the "unbeliever." A new voice of awareness and self-irony is also heard. In one of her best poems, "Flee on Your Donkey," Sexton realizes her madness has lost its "innocence." All the years of "dredging" dreams, "like an old woman with arthritic fingers, / carefully straining the water out," have only brought her back to the same "scene of the disordered senses," the "sad hotel" or mental institution from which she urges herself to flee. This book ends on an affirmative note: "I say Live, Live because of the sun, / the dream, the excitable gift."

Probably most notable are her poems on womanhood. In "Those Times…, " Sexton remembers childhood humiliations and how she "hid in the closet" waiting "among shoes / I was sure to outgrow" while she "planned my growth and my womanhood." The joyous lyric "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman" is addressed to her daughter who is about to discover that "women are born twice." The frustrations of being female are the focus of poems like "One for My Dame," "Man and Wife," and "Menstruation at Forty," frustrations which, in "Consorting with Angels," culminate in Sexton's weariness with the "gender of things"—her own and that of the "men who sat at my table, / circled around the bowl I offered up."

Sexton's interest in the religious drama of self led to an only moderately successful psychodrama, the one-act play Mercy Street (produced at the American Place Theatre, New York City, 1969) as well as several experimental short stories. More successful was Conrad Susa's freeform operatic adaptation of Transformations (1971), Sexton's colloquially rendered poetic fairytales, which was produced by the Minneapolis Opera Company in 1973 and televised in 1978. These experiments foreshadow some of the characteristics of Sexton's later poetry: the looser poetic-prose line, the bold image, and the informal interpretations of mythic characters and situations.

Although Sexton's poetry has sometimes been labeled bathetic or hysterical, the startling force of the hyperbolic image is her forte. In her best poetry, Sexton explores the intensely personal but also universal conflict between the creative and self-destructive selves, a schizophrenic drama controlled by formal metrical patterns and casually placed rhymes. The elegiac voice searches for the lost, original self that has been tainted with experience and repressed in shame.

Although the frankness of her approach and the rather limited range of her autobiographical themes will continue to alienate some readers, Sexton attained a significant ranking among contemporary confessional poets.

Other Works:

All My Pretty Ones (1962). Eggs of Things (with M. Kumin, 1963). More Eggs of Things (with M. Kumin, 1964). Selected Poems (1967). Poems (with D. Livingston and T. Kinsella, 1968). Love Poems (1969, 1989). Joey and the Birthday Present (with M. Kumin, 1971). The Book of Folly (1972). O Ye Tongues (1973). The Death Notebooks (1974). The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975). The Wizard's Tears (with M. Kumin, 1975). 45 Mercy Street (edited by L. G. Sexton, 1976). Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (edited by L. G. Sexton, 1977, 1991). No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose (1985). Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (edited by D. W. Middlebrook and D. H. George, 1988, 1991).

Contributor of poetry to: What Did Miss Darrington See? An Anthology of Feminist Supernatural Fiction (1989); No More Masks! An Anthology of Twentieth-Century American Women Poets, Newly Revised and Expanded (1993); Eight American Poets: Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, Allen Ginsberg, James Merrill: An Anthology (1994, 1997); Nature's Ban: Women's Incest Literature (1996); Splash! Great Writing About Swimming (1996); An Anthology of Great U.S. Women Poets, 1850-1990: Temples and Palaces (1997); and others.

Bibliography:

Barnard, C. K., Anne Sexton (1989). Bixler, F., et al, eds., Original Essays on the Poetry of Anne Sexton (1988). Colburn, S. E., ed., Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale (1988). Donovan, J. A., Her Kind: Personae in Anne Sexton's Poetry (dissertation, 1993). George, D. H., Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton (1987). George, D. H., ed., Sexton: Selected Criticism (1988). Hall, C. K. B. Anne Sexton (1989). Hedges, E., and Fishkin, S. F., eds., Listening to Silences: New Essays in Feminist Criticism (1994). Heyen, W., ed., American Poets in 1976 (1976). Hungerford, E., ed., Poets in Progress: Critical Prefaces to Thirteen Modern American Poets (1967). Lacey, P. A., The Inner War: Forms and Themes in Recent American Poetry (1976). Markey, J., A New Tradition? The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich: A Study of Feminism and Poetry (1988). McClatchy, J. D., ed., Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics (1978). Middlebrook, D. W., Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991). Mills, Jr., R. J., Contemporary American Poetry (1966). Morton, R. E., Anne Sexton's Poetry of Redemption: The Chronology of a Pilgrimage (1988). Northouse, C., and Walsh, R. P., Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide (1974). Phillips, R., The Confessional Poets (1973). Plimpton, G., ed., Women Writers at Work: The Paris Review Interviews (revised edition, 1998). Rosenthal, M. L., The New Poets: American and British Poetry Since World War II (1967). Seduction and Theory: Readings of Gender, Representation, and Rhetoric (1989). Sexton, L. G., Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994). Shaw, R., ed., American Poetry Since 1960:Some Critical Perspectives (1973). Showalter, E., et al, eds., Modern American Women Writers (1993). Smith, S. E., Serious Daring: Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton (dissertation, 1998). Wagner-Martin, L., Critical Essays on Anne Sexton (1989).

Reference works:

Oxford Companion to Women's Writing in the United States (1995). Poetry Criticism (1991). Twayne's Women Authors on CD (CD, 1995).

Other references:

Anne Sexton Reads (audiocassette, 1999). Boston Phoenix (Nov. 1994). Centennial Review (Spring 1975). Contemporary Literature (Fall 1992). In Their Own Voices: A Century of Recorded Poetry (audio cassette & CD, 1996). Journal of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis (Winter 1992). Literature and Psychology (1993). Mythlore (Winter 1994). NMAL (Summer 1979). WRB (Apr. 1995).

—KATHLEEN L. NICHOLS