Love Poems was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1969 and represented something genuinely new in American poetry: a collection by a woman that treated female sexual experience with the same frankness and authority that male poets had always claimed for themselves. If Sexton’s earlier collections broke taboos around mental illness and death, Love Poems broke the taboo around female desire — the speaking of it, the celebrating of it, the insistence that a woman’s body was her own territory to map.
The Collection
The poems are organized around a love affair — addressed to a “you” who is both specific and universal — and they move from first desire through consummation to separation. The sequence has the emotional arc of a novel: anticipation, ecstasy, domestication, disillusionment, loss.
“The Kiss” — “My mouth blooms like a cut.” The poem’s opening image establishes Sexton’s method throughout the collection: the erotic rendered in terms that are simultaneously beautiful and violent, the body understood as both a site of pleasure and a wound.
“The Breast” — a poem of explicit physical celebration that was shocking in 1969 and remains unusual in its lack of shame or irony. Sexton describes her own body with the directness of a painter examining a model — clinical and worshipful simultaneously.
“That Day” — a poem about the first sexual encounter, rendered with specificity (“your trousers, your shoes, / your pockets of coins”) that insists on the concrete reality of desire against the tendency to aestheticize or euphemize it.
“In Celebration of My Uterus” — the collection’s most expansive poem, a Whitmanesque catalog that universalizes female embodiment. “Sweet weight, / in celebration of the woman I am.”
“Eighteen Days Without You” — the collection’s final sequence, a series of eighteen poems about absence and longing that traces the aftermath of the affair’s end.
Context and Significance
Love Poems appeared in 1969 — the year of Woodstock, the Summer of Love’s aftermath, and the beginning of second-wave feminism’s engagement with sexuality. The collection anticipated the feminist claim that “the personal is political” by insisting that female sexual experience was worthy of poetic attention on its own terms, not merely as an adjunct to male desire or a metaphor for something else.
Sexton’s frankness was not the frankness of the counterculture (which tended toward communal, abstract celebration) but something more individual and more disturbing: the insistence of a specific woman, in a specific body, that her pleasure and her pain were subjects of universal significance.
The collection influenced subsequent generations of women poets — Sharon Olds, Kim Addonizio, Dorianne Laux — who continued Sexton’s project of claiming the female body as poetic territory.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, in 1969. First printings are identified by:
- Houghton Mifflin imprint on title page
- First printing indicators on copyright page
- Cloth binding with dust jacket
The collection sold better than Sexton’s earlier books, benefiting both from her Pulitzer reputation and from the cultural moment’s receptivity to sexual frankness.
Collecting Love Poems
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1969): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $100–$300. The larger first printing makes this somewhat more available than Sexton’s earlier collections.
Signed copies bring $400–$1,200. Sexton was active on the poetry reading circuit during this period.
Limited editions: A signed limited edition was produced in a slipcase — these bring $500–$1,500.
Love Poems is collected both as a Sexton title and as a document of feminist literary history. Its frankness continues to distinguish it from more cautious treatments of female sexuality in verse.