Anne Sexton

American poet

• Born: November 9, 1928
• Birthplace: Newton, Massachusetts
• Died: October 4, 1974
• Place of death: Weston, Massachusetts

Despite a modest education and perhaps because of a lifelong struggle with emotional and mental illness, Sexton became a “confessional” poet and was celebrated by critics, academics, and the public as a new voice in literature and a poet for the causes of feminism. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967.

Early Life

Anne Sexton was the youngest of three daughters born to Ralph Harvey and Mary Gray Staples Harvey. Although Ralph Harvey had only a high school education, he did well in the New England wool business and opened his own firm shortly after Sexton was born. Sexton’s mother, Mary Gray Staples, was born into a Maine family whose members held important positions in state politics and journalism. An adored only child, Mary Gray was sent to boarding school and completed three years at Wellesley College.

The three Harvey daughters were never close, and Sexton grew up a lonely child. Ralph Harvey was fastidious of appearance, and Sexton’s messy clothes and loud voice failed to please him. Years after her sisters were permitted to join their parents at the dinner table, Sexton continued to eat in the breakfast room with the nurse. Her parents went out most nights, threw large parties, and drank constantly. Sexton’s only happy memories were of summers at the Squirrel Island, Maine, vacation home with her mother’s extended family. A great-aunt, Anna Dingley, who had lived abroad and later become a reporter for her father’s newspaper, provided Sexton’s greatest family affection. Despite her full life, Dingley, called “Nana” by the children, played the family spinster. She moved in with the Harveys when Sexton was eleven, and Sexton remembers her as the only person who provided a parent’s unconditional love.

Sexton bloomed during her teenage years. Her mother, hoping to remedy her “boy-crazy” behavior, sent her to Rogers Hall, a girls’ boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts. Although she was an indifferent student, Sexton published early poems in the school yearbook. She went on to Garland School, a finishing school in Boston, and became engaged. While still engaged, she met Alfred Muller Sexton II, called “Kayo,” a young man from a prosperous Boston suburb, and eloped with him on August 16, 1948. Their first daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, was born in the summer of 1953, and Joyce Ladd Sexton was born two years later. Kayo accepted a job as wool salesman from his father-in-law, and the young family settled down near Boston, close to their childhood homes.

Despite the idealized roles of housewife and mother in the 1950’s, Sexton was severely depressed after the birth of her second child. She suffered terrors and fits of rage during which she abused the children and even attempted suicide. Her family paid first for household help, then for psychiatric help. While the children lived with relatives, Sexton began treatment first with Martha Brunner-Orne in 1955, and later with her son, Martin Orne. Recognizing Sexton’s creative potential, he encouraged her to write. After another suicide attempt in May, 1957, Orne told her that she could not kill herself; she had too much to give through her poetry. Sexton, the poet, was born.

Life’s Work

With Orne’s encouragement, Sexton enrolled in an evening poetry workshop and began to send her poems out for possible publication. More important, however, was the bond she formed with another student in the workshop, Maxine Kumin, which was to become the most fruitful poetic relationship in Sexton’s life. The well-educated Kumin was three years older than Sexton, also had small children, and published regularly. Her instant recognition of Sexton’s gift cemented a friendship that would comfort Sexton for the rest of her life.

By spring of 1958, Sexton was taking a new antidepressant drug and felt well enough for her daughter, Joy, to come home to live. She received occasional acceptances from prestigious magazines such as Harper’s and The New Yorker. Her poetry was developing in new directions, partly as a result of her encounter with “Heart’s Needle,” a poem by W. D. Snodgrass that was seminal in what was to become known as “confessional” poetry. This poetry addresses the “unpoetic” themes in a person’s life: domestic struggles, personal failure, and mental illness. At its best, it is well crafted and formally polished. Sexton attended the Writer’s Conference at Antioch College in Ohio, where Snodgrass led a week’s workshop. This marked the start of a long correspondence in which Snodgrass helped her find an authentic voice and encouraged her tendency to use poems as vehicles of autobiography and self-analysis. Her connection with Snodgrass led to an acceptance in Robert Lowell’s famous writing seminar at Boston University, where she became friendly with poet Sylvia Plath. It was here that Sexton started her first major poem, “The Double Image,” which established her among the new confessional poets.

In May of 1959, Houghton Mifflin accepted Sexton’s first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back . Even before it appeared, Sexton was in demand for readings at Harvard and for a series of recordings at Yale. The book came out in April, 1960, and received wide attention, partly because of Sexton’s honesty in speaking of her mental illness. On the strength of the book, she was one of the first to apply to a new program at Radcliffe College designed for women whose careers had been interrupted. When Sexton received an acceptance the day after her friend, Kumin, received hers, she was jubilant. An honorarium of $2,000 that came with it was used to convert the back porch to a study for her use, but the biggest difference was in her relationship to her family. They finally considered her work respectable. Sexton felt well during this period and started to enjoy being with her family, particularly around their new swimming pool. Kumin frequently joined her with her children, and their friendship deepened. In the fall of 1961, Newsweek featured Sexton in an article on Radcliffe’s new program, and soon afterward The New Yorker offered her a coveted “first reader” agreement. Some of her strongest poems date from this time, including “The Fortress,” which was written for her daughter Linda.

All My Pretty Ones , her second collection, came out in October of 1962 and won mostly rave reviews. On the short list for the National Book Award, it established the themes she was to write about for the rest of her life: mental illness, sexual love, and spiritual anguish. A new orientation to her themes was to come with her growing interest in the feminist movement, triggered by the landmark publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963).

The suicide of her friend Plath in 1963 affected her badly, and to make matters worse, she became involved in an affair with her new therapist. She worked on a long-abandoned play, but broke down and was hospitalized briefly. Her doctor prescribed Thorazine, which produced severe, long-term side effects. Nevertheless, Sexton continued to write. A new poetry collection called Live or Die came out in September of 1966 to mixed reviews. That same autumn, Sexton’s therapist, Ollie Zweitung, terminated their affair. Distraught, she fell down the stairs at home and broke her hip.

After a long winter of convalescing, Sexton received heartening news: She had won a Pulitzer Prize. During this period, Sexton completed work for her next collection, Love Poems , which appeared in 1968. The following year there was some interest in her play Mercy Street, and she received a Guggenheim Foundation award that would help fund production. The play opened in October of 1969 at the American Place Theater in New York to mixed reviews, and had a brief run. A more successful venture was Transformations . Intended to be a popular poetry book of black humor, it took the form of fairy tales that Sexton transformed from the traditional ones. In September, 1972, Sexton was appointed an adjunct professor at Boston University, and she also accepted an appointment in literature at Colgate University, which required a long weekly journey to teach two days of classes in New York. In spite of her teaching commitments, she completed The Book of Folly and continued to work on The Death Notebooks , which turned out to be the last collection published during her lifetime.

Professional success did not alleviate her inner turmoil. During twenty days in January, 1973, that included two days in a mental hospital, Sexton wrote thirty-nine poems that were to make up a posthumous volume: The Awful Rowing Towards God . The poems came from a sudden frenzy of energy that resulted in bursts of images, and it was Kumin’s encouragement that guided Sexton in the editing that completed the book. During the same surge of energy, Sexton made a decision to divorce her husband, an act that enraged her family.

After the publication of The Death Notebooks in February, 1974, Sexton was bombarded with requests for personal appearances. The high point of that winter was a reading in March arranged by the Harvard Literary Club, which was to be the Boston debut of The Death Notebooks. It turned out to be a triumph. Nevertheless, she was becoming more unstable, and she made another suicide attempt. Increasingly isolated from her family and old friends, she began to drink heavily and engaged in casual affairs with strangers. On Friday, October 4, 1974, she had a last working lunch with Kumin, then went home and committed suicide.

Significance

Sexton’s poetry was particularly important to young women in the 1960’s and 1970’s because of its intimate nature and feminist themes. She illustrated the problematic position of women at the time, the struggle to create an identity beyond what was recognized as “women’s place in society.” Another important feminist theme grew from Sexton’s relationship with her mother and daughters. Some of Sexton’s poems suggest that a woman is her mother and open the way for a new evaluation of the mother-daughter connection. Sexton wrote of menstruation, abortion, incest, adultery, and drug addiction when such topics were not considered suitable for poetry, particularly by male critics. Always grateful for the support of other women poets, she had much in common with Plath, Kumin, May Swenson, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov.

Sexton’s poetry often addresses the sexual stereotyping of women and other themes that were central to the emerging feminist movement. As Sexton struggled with these issues in her own life, she confronted problems that she could not solve, but she was able to use them in her art. Contemporary women’s poetry owes a debt to Sexton’s pioneering work, which gave women the courage to think about their own lives honestly and courageously.

Bibliography

George, Diana Hume, ed. Sexton: Selected Criticism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988. George has collected eighteen essays that represent diverse perspectives and conclusions, although they all approach Sexton’s work from a feminist viewpoint. Some are published here for the first time.

Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Anne Sexton. Boston: Twayne, 1989. This book studies Sexton’s poetry chronologically with the aim of acquainting the reader with the whole work of an important poet. Hall examines the poet as the subject of her poems. This series volume is a useful introduction, providing a framework for more advanced study.

McGowan, Philip. Anne Sexton and Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2004. Focuses on Sexton’s poetry rather than her life to chart the development of her poetic aesthetic.

Markey, Janice. A New Tradition? The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Adrienne Rich. New York: P. Lang, 1985. This valuable textual analysis tries to fit the three poets’ work into the literary tradition. The relationship between feminism and poetry that characterizes the work of all three poets is discussed at length.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991. Both comprehensive and controversial, Middlebrook’s sources include tapes from Sexton’s psychotherapy sessions with Martin Orne. The biographer uses them to illustrate the inextricable connection between the poet’s illness and her writing.

Salvio, Paula M. Anne Sexton: A Teacher of Weird Abundance. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007. Examines Sexton’s work as a teacher, finding in her pedagogy a “weird abundance” of tactics and strategies.

Sexton, Linda Gray, and Lois Ames, eds. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977. Among these letters are intimate writings by Sexton to family members, as well as more formal correspondence to some of the major figures of twentieth century literature. The editors provide a helpful commentary.