1928-1974
I first discovered the poetry of Anne Sexton when I was in college,, five years after her death. When I mentioned my attraction to her poetry to an English professor I had at the time, he scoffed and rattled off suggested names of "real poets". I never allowed his opinion to cloud my passion for the work of Anne Sexton. All of these years I have kept my tattered copies of To Bedlam And Partway Back, Live or Die and The Awful Rowing Toward God. I think she's an amazing poet; brutally honest and a person whose humanity was both flinching and accessible.
I'll provide an informal bio based on what I know about her. She was born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1928 to affluent parents. Married at nineteen, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression after the birth of her first child. While raising her children, Sexton suffered many mental breakdowns and was hospitalized on several occasions, experiences she wrote about in several poems.
On the advice of her psychiatrist, Sexton began to write poetry as therapy. She was a poetry workshop student of Robert Lowell and became a close friend of the poet Maxine Kumin but otherwise had no academic training as a writer or poet. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poems Live or Die and enjoyed several other poetry awards. Despite achieving these successes as a poet, Anne Sexton committed suicide in 1974, at the age of 46.
Despite her troubled life, Sexton was known as irreverent and funny. She struggled with marriage and parenting and had many extramarital affairs. During her career she fronted a chamber rock band called Anne Sexton And Her Kind, who played musical backdrops to Sexton's poems. She also wrote a play called 45 Mercy Street.
Anne Sexton's poetic themes often centered around womanhood and touched upon topics that were considered controversial in her time: masturbation, abortion, infidelity and, of course, mental illness and death. Her style of self-revelatory poetry was often referred to as confessional and lumped into the category of feminist poetry, though Sexton was not a self-described feminist. About her work, Sexton stated, I hold back nothing.
In 1992, Diane Middlebrook published a controversial biography of Anne Sexton that included transcripts of over three hundred taped therapy sessions released by Sexton's psychotherapist. The Sexton estate claims that Anne Sexton would have wanted the tapes released but critics have pointed to the lack of ethics both of the psychotherapist and the biographer.
Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
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.
Anne Sexton
