The Death Notebooks was published by Houghton Mifflin in February 1974. On October 4 of that year, Anne Sexton put on her mother’s fur coat, poured a glass of vodka, went to the garage, and turned on the car engine. She was forty-five years old. The proximity of the book’s publication to its author’s death gives The Death Notebooks an unbearable retrospective weight — though to read it solely as a suicide note would be to miss its theological ambition, its formal invention, and its desperate, contradictory vitality.
The Collection
The Death Notebooks is structured in two parts. The first, “The Death Baby,” is a sequence of nine poems that trace death from infancy onward — death not as a future event but as a companion, a twin, a presence that has been alongside the poet from birth. The second part consists of individual poems addressing God, sex, the body, and the impossibility of continued existence.
“The Death Baby” — the sequence’s opening. “Death, I need my little addiction to you.” Sexton addresses death as one might address a lover — with intimacy, familiarity, and the particular candor that comes from long acquaintance.
“Baby” — a terrifying poem in which the speaker reimagines herself as an infant, helpless and aware of death’s presence in the crib. The regression to infancy is both psychological (the desire to return to pre-consciousness) and spiritual (the infant’s proximity to whatever preceded life).
“Gods” — a catalog of possible deities, none adequate: “I need God / but I need him warm. / I need God / but I need him human.” The poem expresses a faith that is simultaneously absolute and absolutely frustrated.
“O Ye Tongues” — a long sequence of psalms written in imitation of Christopher Smart’s Jubilate Agno. The psalms alternate between celebration and despair, praise and accusation, in a voice that sounds genuinely ecstatic — genuinely praising — even as it moves toward self-destruction.
Theological Ambition
The collection’s most striking quality is its religious seriousness. Sexton had always engaged with God — from the early poems’ angry addresses to a silent deity through the communion poems of the middle period — but The Death Notebooks represents her most sustained theological project. She is not writing about faith as a topic; she is attempting to perform faith, to enact through language the relationship with God that her rational self cannot achieve.
The “O Ye Tongues” psalms are particularly remarkable. Written in a state that Sexton described as “a kind of trance,” they have an ecstatic, visionary quality unlike anything else in her work. They praise God through the enumeration of ordinary things — naming creation as an act of worship — while simultaneously expressing rage at a God who made a creature capable of suffering as intensely as Sexton suffered.
Context and Composition
Sexton wrote many of these poems during 1972-1973, a period of accelerating personal disintegration. Her marriage had ended, her relationship with her daughters was strained, her drinking was uncontrolled, and her mental health was deteriorating beyond the capacity of therapy or medication to address. The poems bear marks of this extremity — they are wilder, less formally controlled than her earlier work, more willing to take risks that don’t always succeed.
But they are not defeated poems. Even facing death — choosing death — Sexton maintains her characteristic energy, her hunger for experience, her insistence on naming what she sees. The collection’s paradox is that its subject is the end of language, yet it produces some of Sexton’s most inventive and verbally alive work.
Publication History
The first edition was published by Houghton Mifflin, Boston, in February 1974. First printings are identified by:
- Houghton Mifflin imprint on title page
- First printing indicators on copyright page
- Cloth binding with dust jacket
The collection’s publication was followed by Sexton’s suicide eight months later, which transformed public perception of the book from a collection of poems about death into what many read as a testament — the artist’s final word.
Collecting The Death Notebooks
First edition (Houghton Mifflin, 1974): Fine copies in dust jacket bring $150–$400. The book’s morbid association with Sexton’s death has made it a reliably collected title.
Signed copies are particularly valued, as Sexton died within months of publication — they represent among her last signatures. Signed firsts bring $500–$2,000.
Pre-death copies (those with dated inscriptions or evidence of purchase before October 1974) carry a premium for their temporal proximity to the event.
The collection’s theological ambition and its biographical weight make it one of the most significant Sexton titles, though its uneven formal quality means some collectors and critics rank it below the earlier, more controlled work.