Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton (9 November 1928 – 4 October 1974) was an American confessional poet who wrote about madness, sexuality, the female body, motherhood, adultery, menstruation, abortion, and death with a candour that had no precedent in American poetry and that helped make it possible for subsequent poets — particularly women — to treat their private experiences as legitimate literary material. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966), published ten collections in fourteen years, and killed herself by carbon monoxide poisoning at forty-five. Her life and her poetry are so thoroughly intertwined that they are almost impossible to discuss separately — which is both Sexton’s achievement and her limitation.

Life and Career

Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, into a prosperous but emotionally cold New England family. She married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton at nineteen and became a suburban housewife and mother — a role that, as she later wrote, nearly destroyed her. In 1956, after the birth of her second daughter, she suffered a severe mental breakdown, was hospitalised, and attempted suicide for the first time. Her psychiatrist suggested she try writing poetry as therapy.

The suggestion transformed her life. She enrolled in poetry workshops — studying with John Holmes and then with Robert Lowell at Boston University, where her classmate was Sylvia Plath. The two women became close, sharing an intensity of ambition and a preoccupation with death that linked their work and their fates.

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) — her debut — was a sensation. Poems like “You, Doctor Martin” (about her psychiatrist), “Her Kind” (“I have gone out, a possessed witch”), and “The Double Image” (about her relationship with her mother and her daughter during her hospitalisations) announced a poet who was willing to write about mental illness, suicide, and the failures of motherhood with a directness that violated every convention of decorum. John Holmes, her first teacher, had explicitly warned her against publishing such personal material. She published it anyway.

All My Pretty Ones (1962) — its title from Macbeth — deepened the confession: poems about her father’s death, her alcoholism, her guilt about her children, and her ambivalent relationship with God. Live or Die (1966) — whose final poem, “Live,” ends with the declaration “I say Live, Live because of the sun, / the dream, the excitable gift” — won the Pulitzer Prize.

Love Poems (1969) was her most explicitly sexual collection — poems about adultery, desire, and the female body that were shocking in their time and remain powerful. Transformations (1971) — a retelling of Grimm’s fairy tales in Sexton’s darkly comic, psychologically probing voice — is her most accessible and probably her most enduring book. The tales — “Snow White,” “Cinderella,” “Rapunzel,” “Briar Rose” — are transformed into parables of female experience, stripping away the fairy-tale comfort to reveal the violence, sexuality, and desperation beneath.

Her later collections — The Book of Folly (1972), The Death Notebooks (1974), The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975, posthumous) — show a poet struggling with religious obsession and deteriorating mental health. She killed herself on 4 October 1974, sitting in her garage with the engine running, wearing her mother’s fur coat.

Themes and Style

Sexton’s poetry is confessional in the most literal sense: she treats the poem as a space of disclosure, revealing experiences — mental illness, attempted suicide, sexual desire, maternal ambivalence, incest — that her culture insisted be kept private. Her verse is formally skilled (she writes in traditional forms as often as in free verse), emotionally intense, and darkly funny. Her signature is the ability to combine the language of psychoanalysis with the imagery of domestic life and fairy tale, creating poems that are simultaneously clinical and mythic.

The critical debate about Sexton centres on whether confessional poetry’s power depends on the poet’s suffering — whether the poetry can be separated from the biography, and whether it should be. The posthumous revelation (by her biographer Diane Wood Middlebrook) that Sexton’s psychiatrist had shared tape recordings of their sessions raised additional questions about the ethics of confession.

Critical Standing

Sexton is one of the central figures of confessional poetry alongside Lowell, Plath, and Berryman. Her influence on later poets — Sharon Olds, Louise Glück, Marie Howe — is substantial. Transformations is her most taught book and the one most likely to endure independent of biographical context.

Key Works

• To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
• All My Pretty Ones (1962)
• Live or Die (1966)
• Transformations (1971)

Collecting Sexton

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960, Houghton Mifflin) — her debut — brings $200–$600 in fine first edition. All My Pretty Ones (1962, Houghton Mifflin) brings $100–$300. Transformations (1971, Houghton Mifflin) — with illustrations by Barbara Swan — brings $80–$200. Sexton signed at readings; signed copies are available but increasingly valued.