SEXTON, Anne

(b. 9 November 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts; d. 4 October 1974 in Weston, Massachusetts), Pulitzer Prize–winning poet and performer, popular in the 1960s for her dramatic flair and controversial confessional writing.

Born Anne Gray Harvey, Sexton was the youngest of three daughters born to Mary Gray Staples, a homemaker with unfulfilled literary aspirations, and Ralph Churchill Harvey, the owner of a successful woolen mill. Although the family was wealthy, Sexton had a painful home life (including possible sexual abuse) as a child and gravitated toward her great-aunt ("Nana" Anna Dingley) for comfort and security.

Sexton attended public schools in Wellesley, Massachusetts, and then Rogers Hall, a girls' preparatory school in Lowell, Massachusetts, from which she graduated in 1947. Hoping to transform their disobedient daughter into a proper lady, Sexton's parents sent her to the Garland School in Boston, a finishing school for women. There Sexton met and, on 16 August 1948, eloped with Alfred Muller "Kayo" Sexton II. The Sextons later bought a home in Newton Lower Falls, Massachusetts, and had two daughters.

The Sextons may have appeared to be an idyllic 1950s suburban family, but Sexton's continuing anxiety and depression were never far from the surface. During her husband's service in Korea, she engaged in occasional infidelities (which continued throughout their marriage) and abuse of the children. In 1955 she began psychiatric treatment for what was initially diagnosed as postpartum depression. Although managed at times, her condition worsened through her short life, leading to several suicide attempts and intermittent institutionalization. In 1956 her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin T. Orne, encouraged Sexton to use poetry writing as part of her therapeutic process. This was the beginning of Sexton's remarkable career as a so-called confessional poet.

Sexton always saw a close relationship between writing and psychotherapy. Her most successful poetry translates her "private terrors" (as she put it) into public forms. The unusual beginnings of her work, on the analyst's couch, portended not only her poetry's range but also the ways in which it was received. On the one hand, it was praised for its raw feeling, gutsy candor, and confessional intimacy. On the other hand, it was condemned for its lack of decorum, both personal and poetic. Sexton's work appeared just at the right time. With its dramatic secrecy, its flamboyant gestures, and its willingness to address taboo issues (particularly women's sexuality), her poetry was perfectly calibrated for the 1960s.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Sexton set out to transform herself from a suburban housewife and part-time model into a serious poet. She enrolled in writing courses and joined workshops around Boston where she met poets such as George Starbuck, John Clellon Holmes, and Maxine Kumin. Sexton's work progressed with help from W. D. Snodgrass (whose autobiographical poem "Heart's Needle" is generally considered the first confessional work) and Robert Lowell (perhaps the most respected contemporary poet in America at the time). Through Lowell's writing seminar at Boston University, Sexton also met Sylvia Plath, to whom her personal subjects, biting tone, and dark obsessions are often compared. Indeed, when Plath committed suicide in 1963, a decade before she did, Sexton reportedly remarked to her doctor, "That death was mine!"

Lowell was instrumental in helping Sexton publish her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), a poetic treatment of her descent into, and partial recovery from, madness. This first book establishes Sexton's most identifiable persona, the "mad housewife," and also one of her primary themes: the death impulse. "Suicides have a special language," she writes in "Wanting to Die," "Like carpenters they want to know which tools. / They never ask why build." As with Plath and other so-called extremist artists, the insistent closeness of death is part of what gives the work its charge. As Sexton wrote in a 1963 letter, "The soul is … a human being who speaks with the pressure of death at his head."

Having little academic background, Sexton continued to professionalize herself through her appointment, in 1961, as an artist/scholar at the newly founded Radcliffe Institute. Here she was first exposed to feminist thought, reading work from Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own to Betty Friedan's controversial 1960s manifesto of the women's movement, The Feminine Mystique. This education was crucial to the kind of poetry Sexton would produce throughout the 1960s, with its assertive focus on female experience. Characteristic poems with titles such as "The Abortion" and "Menstruation at Forty" unabashedly treated the secret subjects of women's lives—from marital and family relations to incest, adultery, and abuse. Her forthrightness made Sexton extremely popular in some circles and equally reviled in others. Whatever the judgment, one of her legacies was to give women's experience an important place in contemporary poetry. In this respect, Sexton paved the way for much of the feminist poetry of the coming decades. While other writers were concentrating on overtly political themes centered on the Vietnam War, Sexton proved her assertion that "poems of the inner life can reach the inner lives of readers in a way that anti-war poems can never stop a war."

All My Pretty Ones (1962), Sexton's second collection, was another popular success, and, like her first volume, it was nominated for the National Book Award. It continues her confessional themes and deals movingly with personal experiences of loss. This was a subject of some urgency to a poet who had lost not only her beloved great-aunt in 1954, but also both her parents to unexpected illnesses in 1959.

In May 1963 Sexton was awarded a traveling fellowship by the American Academy of Arts and Letters, which she used to tour Europe for three months. Her popularity spread quickly, and in 1964 Britain's prestigious Oxford University Press published Selected Poems. This led to her election as a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, London, in 1965. Among Sexton's other awards and honors during the decade are the Levinson Prize (1962), the Shelley Memorial Prize (1967), and the Pulitzer Prize (1967) for her third volume, Live or Die. She was also the recipient of several honorary doctoral degrees and professorships at Colgate University and Boston University.

Despite all these successes, Sexton's mental condition worsened. In the mid-1960s her psychiatrist began audio-taping their therapy sessions as a way of helping the patient recall material she might later repress. The tapes became important raw material for Sexton's poetry, which continued to push the boundaries of privacy. As well, the tapes, which were released by her doctor after Sexton's death, became the centerpiece of a controversy surrounding Diane Wood Middlebrook's Anne Sexton; A Biography (1991). The decision to release the tapes, which contain intimate revelations about Sexton's many extramarital affairs (including one with her second psychiatrist), her alcoholism, and her sexual abuse of her own daughter, sparked controversy in both literary and psychiatric circles for its perceived disregard of doctor-patient privilege.

Therapy informed not only Sexton's poetry but also her decade-long work on a play that uses the psychoanalytical process as its model and incest as its central image. This work went through three distinct drafts: "The Cure" (1962), "Tell Me Your Answer True" (1964), and finally Mercy Street (1969)—the only version actually produced. Performed at the American Place Theatre in New York, the play was praised for its lyrical language but criticized for its weak theatrical form.

In a more successful mixture of poetry and performance, Sexton began adding music to her already extremely popular readings. Anne Sexton and Her Kind, a chamber rock group that began when one of Sexton's students set several of her poems to music, was an attempt to capitalize on the huge audience for the popular poets of the 1960s such as Bob Dylan and Janis Joplin. Decked out in glamorous evening wear, Sexton chanted her poetry to the accompaniment of a five-piece band. The group's first performance in Boston (July 1968) was a benefit for Eugene McCarthy's bid for the presidency. In the late 1960s, the poetry circuit of American university campuses had become a booming and lucrative business, and Sexton had become a star of the circuit, to the consternation of more academic and serious-minded friends such as Kumin. As Sexton reached for an ever larger audience, the quality of her work declined, according to many critics. Her last books of the decade, Love Poems (1969) and Transformations (1971), were best-sellers but received little critical attention.

The 1970s saw a worsening of Sexton's mental and physical health. Her alcoholism and addiction to prescription drugs isolated her from friends and family. In 1973, after her children had departed for college, she asked her husband for a divorce. It had long been evident from public and private records that Sexton was planning her own death, and despite the efforts of many people close to her to prevent such an act, she committed suicide. On 4 October 1974, after a lunch with Kumin during which they corrected the galley proofs of Sexton's final book, The Awful Rowing Toward God, Sexton returned home, closed the door of her garage, and asphyxiated herself with carbon monoxide. She was cremated, and her ashes were interred in August 1976 at the Sexton family plot at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts.

Although Sexton's importance as a cultural figure of the 1960s seems assured, her status as a major poet and innovator is somewhat less certain. Critics have argued that the confessional label has unfairly confined Sexton, but the fact is her success was crucially tied to the self-revelation and self-performance at the heart of confessional writing. In a memorial essay, Erica Jong described Sexton as "a woman without skin" who "had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her." The ability to turn pain into print, to embody this odd skeletal figure, part witch, part helpless child, will likely be the final legacy, the achievement and the tragedy, of Sexton's art.

All of Sexton's papers are held by the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the University of Texas at Austin. Her correspondence, Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977), is edited by Linda Gray Sexton, her daughter (and literary executor), and Lois Ames. Linda Gray Sexton has also published a telling personal memorial, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton (1994). Diane Wood Middlebrook's Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991) is an extremely readable and useful authorized biography. The major critical work is Diana Hume George, Oedipus Anne: The Poetry of Anne Sexton (1987). Collections of essays include J. D. McClatchy, Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics (1978); Frances Bixler, Original Essays on the Poetry of Anne Sexton (1988); Steven E. Colburn, Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale (1988); Diana Hume George, Sexton: Selected Criticism (1988); and Linda Wagner-Martin, Critical Essays on Anne Sexton (1989). The only extensive bibliographic source is Cameron Northouse and Thomas P. Walsh, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide (1974). No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose was edited by Steven E. Colburn (1985). Sexton's Complete Poems were published in 1981, and Selected Poems was edited by Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diana Hume George in 1988. Obituaries are in the New York Times and the Washington Post (both 6 Oct. 1974) and in Time (14 Oct. 1974).

Mark Silverberg