Anne Sexton
- For the singer Ann Sexton, see Ann Sexton
Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, – October 4, 1974,) born Anne Gray Harvey, was an American poet and writer. Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck e Sylvia Plath Berryman, Roethke
Personal life
Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life near Boston. In 1945, Sexton began attending a boarding school, Rogers Hall, in Lowell, Massachusetts. For a time as a young woman, she modeled at Boston's Hart Agency. She eloped in 1948 with Alfred Muller Sexton, known as "Kayo." Before their divorce in the early 1970s, she had two children with Kayo: Linda Gray Sexton, later a novelist and memoirist, and Joyce Sexton.
Illness and subsequent career
Sexton spoke candidly about her battle with depression, which she fought for most of her life. Her first breakdown took place in 1954. After a second breakdown in 1955, she met Dr. Martin Orne at Glenside Hospital, who encouraged her to take up poetry, and she enrolled in her first poetry workshop with John Holmes as the instructor.
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's poetic life was further encouraged by her mentor, W.D. Snodgrass, whose poem, "Heart's Needle" encouraged her to write "The Double Image," a poem significant in expressing the multi-generational relationships existing between mother and daughter.
While working with Holmes, Sexton encountered Maxine Kumin, with whom she became good friends throughout the rest of her life. Kumin and Sexton rigorously critiqued each other's work, and wrote four children's books together.
She attended a poetry workshop with Sylvia Plath, taught by Robert Lowell in 1957. This relationship is alluded to in the poem "Sylvia's Death" written after Plath's suicide. Later, Sexton herself taught workshops at Boston College, Oberlin College, and Colgate University.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the manic elements of Sexton's illness began to affect her career. She still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry. She also collaborated with some musicians, forming the group Anne Sexton and Her Kind, who were working to put some of her prose to music.
Content and themes of work
Sexton is the modern model of the confessional poet. She was inspired by the publication of Snodgrass' "Heart's Needle."
Sexton helped open the door not only for female poets, but for female issues; Sexton wrote about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, then adultery before such issues were even topics for discussion.
The title for her eighth collection of poetry, The Awful Rowing Toward God, came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although he refused to administer the last rites, did tell her: "God is in your typewriter," which gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing for some more time.
Anne Sexton often gave public readings of her poetry. She had love of drama and the persona of a performer and would sometimes read with her chamber rock group, Her Kind performing the back up music.
She would often facetiously refer to herself as a 'mad housewife' or a 'witch.' The following is an excerpt from her poem,
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.
The popularity of her book, Transformations established her as a dark poet. Here is an excerpt from a collection of nursery tale parodies from the poem Cinderella:
- Cinderella and the prince
- lived, they say, happily ever after,
- like two dolls in a musuem case
- never bothered by diapers or dust,
- never arguing over the timing of an egg,
- never telling the same story twice,
- never getting a middle-aged spread,
- their darling smiles pasted on for eternity.
- Regular Bobbsey Twins
- That story
End of Life and posthumous works
On October 4, 1974 Sexton was having lunch with poet and friend, Maxine Kumin to review her most recent book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. Then without a note or any warning to anyone she went in to her garage, started the ignition of her car, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
In an interview over a year before her death she told an interviewer that she had written the first drafts of The Aweful Rowing Toward God in 20 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. Other posthumous collections of her poems include 45 Mercy Street (1976) and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978), both edited by Linda Gray Sexton. The publication of Sexton's work culminated in The Complete Poems in 1981. Her incisive metaphors, the unexpected rhythms of her verse, and her ability to grasp a range of meaning in precise words have secured Sexton's good reputation. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.
Awards
In 1962 Sexton published All My Pretty Ones. So popular was her poetry in England that an edition of Selected Poems was published there as a Poetry Book Selection in 1964. In 1967 Sexton received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Live or Die (1966), capping her accumulation of honors such as the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (1959), the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1961), the Levinson Prize (1962), the American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship (1963), the Shelley Memorial Prize (1967), and an invitation to give the Morris Gray reading at Harvard. To follow were a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Foundation grants, honorary degrees, professorships at Colgate University and Boston University, and other distinctions.
Sexton never garnered any collegiate accolades or even a degree. although she had many honorary ones.
Controversy
Controversy was stirred with the public release of tapes recorded during Sexton's psychotherapy (and thus subject to doctor-patient confidentiality), wherein Sexton revealed incestuous contact with her daughter.[1] Biographer Diane Middlebrook is quoted as saying, "The Sexton case is absolutely unique, in the importance of her therapy to the development of her art,"
Bibliography
- 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)
- Transformations (1971) ISBN 0-618-08343-X
- The Book of Folly (1972) ISBN 0-395-14014-5
- The Death Notebooks (1974)
- The Awful Rowing Towards God (1975; posthumous)
- 45 Mercy Street (1976; posthumous)
- Words for Dr. Y. (1978; posthumous)
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
Further reading
- Anne Sexton: A Biography, by Diane Wood Middlebrook 1992. ISBN 0-679-74182-8
- Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, by Linda Gray Sexton 1994.
Miscellaneous
- Conrad Susa composed an opera called Transformations, based on her collection of poems by the same name.
- British musician Peter Gabriel wrote a song, "Mercy Street", dedicated to Sexton in 1986.
- Dave Matthews has said that the song Grey Street, from the album Busted Stuff (2002), is inspired by Sexton.
External links
- Poems by Anne Sexton at PoetryFoundation.org
- 1991 audio interview with Diane Wood Middlebrook, author of Anne Sexton by Don Swaim
- Anne Sexton's Gravesite
- Anne Sexton biography and example of poetry. Part of a series of poets.
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