From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts–October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) was an influential American poet and writer known for her highly personal, confessional poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her long battle with depression. After repeated attempts, she took her own life in 1974.

Early life and family

Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Harvey. She spent most of her childhood in Boston. In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school, Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland School.^[1] For a time she modeled for Boston's Hart Agency. On August 16, 1948, she married Alfred Sexton^[2] and they remained together until 1973.^[3]

Poetry

Sexton suffered from severe mental illness for much of her life. Her first manic episode took place in 1954. After a second breakdown in 1955 she met Dr Martin Orne who was to become her long-term therapist at the Glenside Hospital. He encouraged her to take up poetry.^[4]

The first poetry workshop she attended was led by John Holmes. She felt great trepidation about registering for the class, asking a friend to make the phone call and accompany her to the first session. After the workshop Sexton experienced remarkably quick success with her poetry, with her poems accepted by The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the Saturday Review. Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell^[5] at Boston University alongside distinguished poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck.^[3]

Sexton's poetic life was further encouraged by her mentor W.D. Snodgrass, whom she met at the Antioch Writer's Conference in 1957. His poem “Heart’s Needle” proved inspirational for her in its theme of separation from his three year old daughter. She first read the poem at a time when her own young daughter was living with Sexton's mother-in-law. She, in turn, wrote "The Double Image", a poem which explores the multi-generational relationship between mother and daughter. Sexton began writing letters to Snodgrass and they became friends.

While working with John Holmes Sexton encountered Maxine Kumin. They also became good friends and remained so for the rest of her life. Kumin and Sexton rigorously criticized each other's work and wrote four children's books together. In the late 1960s the manic elements of Sexton's illness began to affect her career, though she still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry. She also collaborated with musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called "Her Kind" that added music to her poetry. Her play "Mercy Street" was produced in 1969 after several years of revisions. (Musician Peter Gabriel wrote a song inspired by Sexton's work, also titled "Mercy Street".)

Within twelve years of writing her first sonnet, she was one of the most honored poets in America: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature [and] the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa"^[6]

Death

Grave of Anne Sexton

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with poet Maxine Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton's manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975 (Middlebrook 396). On returning home she put on her mother's old fur coat, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.^[7]

In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first drafts of The Awful Rowing Toward God in twenty days with "two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital." She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.

Content and themes of work

Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Aside from her standard themes of depression, isolation, suicide, and despair, her work also encompasses issues specific to women, such as menstruation, abortion, and more broadly masturbation and adultery, before such subjects were commonly addressed in poetic discourse.

Her work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as "preening, lazy and flip" by otherwise respectful critics.^[6] Some critics regard her dependence on alcohol as compromising her last work. However, other critics see Sexton as a poet whose writing matured over time. "Starting as a relatively conventional writer, she learned to roughen up her line [...] to use as an instrument against the politesse of language, politics, religion [and] sex [...]."^[8]

Her eighth collection of poetry is entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God. The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter". This gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. The Awful Rowing Toward God and The Death Notebooks are among her final works and both centre on the theme of dying.^[9]

Her work started out as being about herself,^[10] however as her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes.^[10] Transformations is one such book that attempts to use Grimm's fairy tales as the source for her poetry.^{[citation needed]} Later she used Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno^[11] and the Bible as the basis for some of her work.

In the analysis of Sexton's work much has been made of the tangled threads of her writing, her life and her depression; much in the same way as with Sylvia Plath's suicide in 1963. John Berryman, Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov commented in separate obituaries on the role of creativity in Sexton's death. Denise Levertov says, "we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction."^[5]

As one of the most famous, modern confessional poets she is often celebrated for the honest gaze of her work. Although she was largely self taught^{[citation needed]} and had never graduated from college, by the end of her life she had garnered a Pulitzer Prize,^[12] fellowships and honorary doctorates.

Subsequent controversy

Following one of many suicide attempts and breakdowns^[6] she worked with therapist Dr. Orne. He diagnosed her with what is now described as bipolar disorder,^{[citation needed]} but his competence to do so is called into question by his early use of allegedly unsound psychotherapeutic techniques. During sessions with Sexton he used hypnosis and sodium pentothal to recover supposedly repressed memories. During this process he allegedly used suggestion to implant false memories of childhood sexual abuse. This abuse was refuted in interviews with her mother and other relatives.^[13] However during the writing of Sexton's biography, Sexton's daughter, Linda Gray Sexton alleged to the book's author that Anne had been sexually assaulted by her mother.^[14]

There is much controversy over the recovery of repressed memories as a useful modality. Dr. Orne wrote that hypnosis in an adult frequently does not present accurate memories of childhood, instead "adults under hypnosis are not literally reliving their early childhoods but presenting them through the prisms of adulthood".^[15] According to Dr. Orne, Anne Sexton was extremely suggestible and would mimic the symptoms of the patients around her in the mental hospitals to which she was committed. Dr. Orne eventually concluded that Anne Sexton was suffering from hysteria.^[4]

The Middlebrook biography states that a separate personality named "Elizabeth" emerged in Sexton while under hypnosis. Dr. Orne did not encourage this development and subsequently this "alternate personality" disappeared.

When Diane Middlebrook published her biography of Anne Sexton (with the approval of Sexton's daughter and literary executor, Linda) it attracted considerable controversy.^[4] For use in the biography, Dr. Orne had given Diane Middlebrook most of the tapes recording the therapy sessions between Orne and Sexton. The use of these tapes was met with, as the New York Times put it, "thunderous condemnation".^[6] As she received the tapes after she had written a substantial amount of the first draft of Sexton's biography, Middlebrook decided to start over. Various members of Sexton's family expressed strong opinions both for and against the Middlebrook biography, in several editorials and op-ed pieces, mainly in The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.

Controversy continued with the posthumous public release of the tapes (which had been subject to doctor-patient confidentiality). They are said to reveal Sexton's inappropriate behavior with her daughter Linda, her physically violent behavior toward her daughters, and her physical altercations with her husband.^[14]

Yet more controversy surrounded allegations that Sexton had had an affair with the therapist who replaced Dr. Orne in the sixties.^[16] No action was taken to censure or discipline the second therapist. Dr. Orne considered the affair with the second therapist (given the pseudonym "Ollie Zweizung" by Middlebrook,^[5] and Linda Sexton) to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her suicide.

Bibliography

Poetry and Prose

• Uncompleted Novel-started in the 1960s
• To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
• All My Pretty Ones (1962)
• Live or Die (1966) - Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1967
• Love Poems (1969)
• Mercy Street, a 2-act play performed at the American Place Theatre (1969)
• Transformations (1971) ISBN 0-618-08343-X
• The Book of Folly (1972)
• The Death Notebooks (1974)
• The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975; posthumous)
• 45 Mercy Street (1976; posthumous)
• Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977; posthumous)
• Words for Dr. Y. (1978; posthumous)
• No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, edited by Steven E. Colburn (1985; posthumous)
• Two Hands(date???)
• The Room of My Life (date??)

Children's books

all co-written with Maxine Kumin

• 1963 Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
• 1964 More Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
• 1974 Joey and the Birthday Present (illustrated by Evaline Ness)
• 1975 The Wizard's Tears (illustrated by Evaline Ness)

References

• Middlebrook, Diane Wood (1992) [1991]. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: Vintage. ISBN 978-0679741824. http://books.google.com/books?id=Tm2-EAyHLRsC. 

Further reading

• Sexton, Linda Gray (1994). Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother. Little, Brown & Co.. ISBN 978-0316782074. 
• McGowan, Philip (2004). Anne Sexton & Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 978-0313315145. 
• Salvio, Paula M. (2007). Anne Sexton: teacher of weird abundance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0791470978. OCLC 70684774. 
• Gill, Jo (2007). Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetics. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0813031750. 
• Middlebrook, Diane Wood (1991). Anne Sexton: A Biography. Reprinted by Vintage Books, 1992. ISBN 0679741828

External links

• Anne Sexton in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
• Poems by Anne Sexton at PoetryFoundation.org
• Anne Sexton's Gravesite
• Anne Sexton at home (video)
• Rare film footage at YouTube of Anne reciting some poetry, and some home movie excerpts. From an Arts Review program from the early 1990s.
• Hear & Now interview with daughter Linda Gray Sexton and Robert Clawson who managed the Sexton's experimental band "Anne Sexton and Her Kind."
• Anne Sexton's papers at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
• Anne Sexton's art collection at the Harry Ransom Center at The University of Texas at Austin
• Spanish translations, Raùl Racedo, Argentina.

From Wikiquote

To love another is something
like prayer and it can't be planned, you just fall
into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.

Anne Sexton (1928-11-09 – 1974-10-04), born Anne Gray Harvey, was an American poet and writer. She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1967 for Live or Die.

Sourced

We are all writing God's poem.

• We are all writing God's poem.
  • As quoted by Erica Jong, in "Into the lion's den" in The Guardian (26 October 2000)

To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)

I imitate
a memory of belief
that I do not own.

• Even so, I must admire your skill.
  You are so gracefully insane.
  • "Elegy in the Classroom"
  • Referring to Robert Lowell

• Love your self's self where it lives.
  There is no special God to refer to; or if there is,
  why did I let you grow
  in another place. You did not know my voice
  when I came back to call. All the superlatives
  of tomorrow's white tree and mistletoe
  will not help you know the holidays you had to miss.
  • "The Double Image"

• I rot on the wall, my own
  Dorian Gray.
  • "The Double Image"

• I imitate
  a memory of belief
  that I do not own.
  • "The Division of Parts"

• I have ridden in your cart, driver,
  waved my nude arms at villages going by,
  learning the last bright routes, survivor
  where your flames still bite my thigh
  and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
  A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
  I have been her kind.
  • "Her Kind"

All My Pretty Ones (1962)

• All who love have lied.
  • "The Operation"

• Fact: death too is in the egg.
  Fact: the body is dumb, the body is meat.
  And tomorrow the O.R. Only the summer was sweet.
  • "The Operation"

• Need is not quite belief.
  • "With Mercy for the Greedy"

• Dearest,
  although everything has happened,
  nothing has happened.
  • "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound"

• A woman who writes feels too much,
  those trances and portents!
  As if cycles and children and islands
  weren't enough; as if mourners and gossips
  and vegetables were never enough.
  She thinks she can warm the stars.
  A writer is essentially a spy.
  Dear love, I am that girl.
  • "The Black Art"

• It would be pleasant to be drunk:
  faithless to my tongue and hands,
  giving up the boundaries
  for the heroic gin.
  Dead drunk is the term I think of,
  insensible,
  neither cool nor warm,
  without a head or foot.
  To be drunk is to be intimate with a fool.
  I will try it shortly.
  • "Letter Written During a January Northeaster"

• And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
  in their stone boats. They are more like stone
  than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
  to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
  • "The Truth the Dead Know"

• In a dream you are never eighty.
  • "Old"

Live or Die (1966)

• I was spread out daily
  and examined for flaws.
  • "Those Times..."

• I grow old on my bitterness.
  • "Two Sons"

• Love! That red disease —
  • "Menstruation at Forty"

• Why have your eyes gone into their own room?
  • "Your Face on the Dog's Neck"

• But suicides have a special language.
  Like carpenters they want to know which tools.
  They never ask why build.
  • "Wanting to Die"

Love Poems (1969)

You said the anger would come back
just as the love did.

• My mouth blooms like a cut.
  I've been wronged all year, tedious
  nights, nothing but rough elbows in them
  and delicate boxes of Kleenex calling crybaby
  crybaby, you fool!
  • "The Kiss"

• I am alive when your fingers are.
  • "The Breast"

• As for me, I am watercolor.
  I wash off.
  • "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife"

• You said the anger would come back
  just as the love did.
  • Again and Again and Again"

• He puts his bones back on,
  Turning the clock back an hour.
  She knows flesh, that skin balloon,
  the unbound limbs, the boards,
  the roof, the removable roof.
  She is his selection, part time.
  You know the story too! Look,
  when it is over he places her,
  like a phone, back on the hook.
  • "You All Know the Story of the Other Woman"

• Catch me. I'm your disease.
  • "Eighteen Days Without You": December 18th

Transformations (1971)

• Beauty is a simple passion,
  but, oh my friends, in the end
  you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes.
  • "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs"

The Book of Folly (1972)

• With a tongue like a razor he will kiss
  the mother, the child,
  and we three will color the stars black
  in memory of his mother
  who kept him chained to the food tree
  or turned him on and off like a water faucet
  and made women through all these hazy years
  the enemy with a heart of lies.
  • "The Wifebeater"

• In my sights I carve him
  like a sculptor. I mold out
  his last look at everyone.
  I carry his eyes and his
  brain bone at every position.
  I know his male sex and I do
  march over him with my index finger.
  His mouth and his anus are one.
  I am at the center of feeling.
  • "The Assassin"

• My eyes, those sluts, those whores, would play no more.
  • "Killing the Spring"

A Small Journal (1974)

ed. Howard Moss

• It doesn't matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.
  • "The Poet's Story," January 1, 1972 entry

The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975)

• The tongue, the Chinese say,
  is like a sharp knife:
  it kills
  without drawing blood.
  • "The Dead Heart"

• I am, each day,
  typing out the God
  my typewriter believes in.
  Very quick. Very intense,
  like a wolf at a live heart.
  • "Frenzy"

45 Mercy Street (1976)

• What can I do with this memory?
  Shake the bones out of it?
  Defoliate the smile?
  Stub out the chin with cigarettes?
  Take the face of the man I love
  and squeeze my foot into it,
  when all the while my heart is making a museum?
  I love you the way the oboe plays.
  I love you the way skinny dipping makes my body feel.
  I love you the way a ripe artichoke tastes.
  Yet I fear you,
  as one in the desert fears the sun.
  • "Waking Alone" from The Divorce Papers

• I am murdering me, where I kneeled at your kiss.
  I am pushing knives through the hands
  that created two into one.
  Our hands do not bleed at this,
  they lie still in their dishonor.
  • "Killing the Love" from The Divorce Papers

• I am stuffing your mouth with your
  promises and watching
  you vomit them out upon my face.
  • "Killing the Love"

• There is rust in my mouth,
  the stain of an old kiss.
  • "The Lost Lie" from The Divorce Papers

Words for Dr. Y (1978)

• Death,
  I need my little addiction to you.
  need that tiny voice who,
  even as I rise from the sea,
  all woman, all there,
  says kill me, kill me.
  • "Letters to Dr. Y."

• I begin again, Dr.Y,
  this neverland journal,
  full of my own sense of filth.
  Why else keep a journal, if not
  to examine your own filth?
  • "Letters to Dr. Y."

• God is only mocked by believers.
  • "Letters to Dr. Y."

• Blue eyes wash off sometimes.
  • "Letters to Dr. Y."

• Here in the hospital, I say,
  that is not my body, not my body.
  I am not here for the doctors
  to read like a recipe.
  • "August 17th" from Scorpio, Bad Spider, Die: The Horoscope Poems

Poems 1971-1973 (1981)

• We all walk softly away.
  We would stay and be the nurse but
  there are too many of us and we are too worried to help.
  It is love that walks away
  and yet we have terrible mouths
  and soft milk hands.
  We worry with like.
  We walk away like love.
  • "To Like, To Love"

• Earth, earth
  riding your merry-go-round
  toward extinction,
  right to the roots
  thickening the oceans like gravy,
  festering in your caves,
  you are becoming a latrine.
  • "As It Was Written" from Last Poems

• To love another is something
  like prayer and it can't be planned, you just fall
  into its arms because your belief undoes your disbelief.
  • "Admonitions to a Special Person" (1974) from Last Poems QOTD 2007·11·09 Sound file

External links

Wikipedia has an article about:

Anne Sexton

• Anne Sexton @ American Poems website
• Anne Sexton @ Modern American Poetry website
• Biography at FemBio – Notable Women International
• 1991 Don Swaim interview with Diane Wood Middlebrook, author of Anne Sexton (RealAudio)