Anne Sexton (1928-1974). Biography and Creativity

Anne Gray Harvey Sexton’s restless lifelong search for her own identity shaped her poetry, which has often been labeled confessional because of its frank, personal subject matter. She wrote of her struggles to cope with the roles imposed on her from a strong, unapologetic woman’s point of view, leading more recent critics to label her poetry feminist.

The classification of her work as confessional is one that Sexton disdained, and she paid little attention to the politics of feminism. Sexton’s bold poetry of intimate self-scrutiny, however, undeniably challenged stereotypes of women just as the American women’s movement did during the decades of the mid-20th century. Her poems gave powerful voice to the deep pain of wounded human beings, as well as to the everyday experiences common to women everywhere. Neither the urge to confess secret sins nor emerging feminism, however, can fully explain the contour of Anne Sexton’s life. Complicated by her art, her addictions, and her psychosis, Sexton’s life, like her poetry, was dramatic and weighted down with turmoil.

She was born in comfortable New England surroundings on November 9, 1928, her future, on the surface, seemingly predictable. Her parents, Ralph and Mary Gray Staples Harvey, were affluent country club members who had conventional expectations of their three daughters. Anne’s mother and father were extremely strong influences in her life. Their hypercritical, unsympathetic presence continued to dominate her thoughts and behavior, as well as her writing, throughout her life. The family tree also included relations on both sides who had suffered from various forms of mental instability, and the family tendency to mental illness would haunt the poet her entire life.

Anne’s early life, filled with the social trappings of her wealthy community, followed the pattern her parents set for her. A beautiful and popular young woman, she attended a private boarding school and enjoyed a whirl of dates, parties, proms, a social debut, and marriage at the age of 19 to Alfred Muller Sexton II. Post-World War II society glorified the “natural” feminine image of wife and mother, and Anne yielded to their appeal. Outwardly, she fulfilled the roles that were expected of her, acting first as the flirty, fashionable, intellectually indifferent student, and then as the young suburban housewife, all the while carrying within her the seeds of something more artistic as well as something more perverse that eventually emerged in the voices of her poems.

The relationships produced by socially approved roles were consistently fragmented and unsatisfactory for her. As a child, she had one extremely close, motherly relationship, with her great-aunt, “Nana”—Anna Dingley—who offered her unconditional approval, warmth, and friendship. Nana suffered a mental breakdown while Anne was in her early teens, but she recovered and remained close to Anne until her death. The maternal Nana appeared in several of Sexton’s works, particularly her play Mercy Street, as the writer explored the complex nature of motherhood.

Sexton’s adult life was dominated by her own mental illness, for while she appeared to be the model housewife of the American 1950s, she was essentially a disturbed woman unable to care for her two daughters. She frequently heard voices that urged her to kill herself. Shortly after the birth of her children, in 1956, beset with depression and anxiety, she attempted suicide and was hospitalized. In the course of her treatment, her therapist sought to find something she could do to enhance her selfesteem and develop her creativity. He eventually suggested that she write about her own experiences.

In response, she began to write poems. Her early poems were raw and unstructured, but from the first, they contained intensely personal subject matter and images of her own life. As a way of fighting insanity, she sought to compose her thoughts and retrieve her memories in verses that reflected her feelings about guilt and madness, family relationships, social confusion, female sexuality, and death. As a mental patient, she searched for the real Anne beneath all the roles and expectations pressed on her by others.

The therapist’s praise gave her the reinforcement she craved; he urged her to keep writing not only for herself but for the sake of others. Sexton often referred to this encouragement as the source of her feeling that she had a role to play that was all her own. Writing poems became not only therapy but obsession and vocation. Throughout her life she continued to write, even as her mental health wavered.

In 1957 Sexton timidly began attending a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. At that workshop she met the instructor, the poet John Holmes, as well as a poet who became her lifelong friend, Maxine Kumin. By her own admission, Sexton had not been interested enough in school to study poetry. Lacking literary allusions that could evoke associations in educated readers, Sexton’s poems plainly reflected her own experience. As a result, her language was accessible, straightforward, and explicit. Sexton’s critics often took issue with her dwelling on the wretched, even repulsive aspects of her experience, but she relished the power she found in graphically depicting the irrationality that was her reality.

What she learned and developed in the workshop was the craft of poetry, the techniques—she called them “tricks”—of making elegant poems with intricate rhyme schemes and patterns. She read, wrote, and revised endlessly. In early 1958 her first poem was printed, in the local Fiddlehead Review. Soon after, she had poems accepted by the Christian Science Monitor, Harper’s, and the New Yorker. Sexton’s work was often set in New England and was concerned with difficult family relationships. The voices in her poems reflected her troubled interactions with her parents; in a number of poems (such as “Young,” “The Death of the Fathers,” and “The Truth the Dead Know”) Sexton explored the complex bond between a daughter and her father.

When Sexton read W. D. Snodgrass’s poem “Heart’s Needle,” about a divorced father struggling to cope with separation from his daughter, she immediately identified with the wrenching personal theme of the poem and recognized a kindred spirit. Autobiographical, direct, and emotional, the poem achieved exactly what she hoped to accomplish in her own work. She arranged to study at a workshop Snodgrass was leading at the Writers’ Conference at Antioch College in Ohio in summer 1958.

There she sought, with his guidance, to locate her own individual voice, and Snodgrass reinforced her instinct to write autobiographical, “confessional” poetry. Snodgrass, who was to become her mentor and friend, had been a student of the well-known poet Robert Lowell. Lowell, after a traumatic period in his life, was working on his own collection of autobiographical and self-analytical poetry. Sexton enrolled in a class that Lowell taught at Boston University in the fall and winter of 1958-59, where she was influenced by his style.

As confessional poets, Lowell, Snodgrass, and Sexton all presented their experience in a stark and direct manner; they wrote about loneliness and alienation, and they spoke plainly about contemplating suicide. About Lowell, Sexton said in a 1968 interview with Barbara Kevles, “He didn’t teach me what to put into a poem, but what to leave out. What he taught me was taste. Perhaps that’s the only thing a poet can be taught” (McClatchy 11).

In Lowell’s class, she met for the first time another young woman poet from the suburbs of Boston, Sylvia Plath, and they formed the habit of continuing their intense discussions of poetry, psychiatrists, and suicide attempts after class over drinks. The highly educated, mentally tormented Plath had been writing modernist poetry with stiff, formal diction. Her association with Lowell and Sexton seemed to influence her to write more personal verse, and her work is now often grouped with theirs in the confessional school.

In early 1958 Sexton wrote a complex poem about the relationship between mothers and daughters, “The Double Image.” The poem is an example of a form Sexton used frequently, the dramatic monologue, filled with images that startle the reader with their clarity. Concrete, often surprising images are the means by which Sexton sought to connect with her audience. In “The Double Image,” for example, she describes the voices compelling her to suicide as “green witches in my head, letting doom / leak like a broken faucet.” In her poem “Music Swims Back to Me,” the stars she sees through the bars of her window at the mental hospital are “strapped to the sky” as she is strapped to her bed.

The night nurse “walks on two erasers” in “Lullaby.” Her “Ghosts” are women with “breasts as limp as killed fish,” and “fat, white-bellied men. / wearing their genitals like old rags.” The stark realism of her language often offended readers who were accustomed to more distance, more formality, and more restraint in their poetry. The prestigious Hudson Review accepted “The Double Image” for publication late in 1958. In early 1959, encouraged by Lowell’s praise, Sexton began assembling her poems for publication in her first book, To Bedlam and PartWay Back. Before the book saw print in May 1960, her parents had both died—Mary Gray of cancer and Ralph Harvey after a stroke.

The same year Sexton was invited to give a reading at Harvard and won two notable awards: the Robert Frost Fellowship to study at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the annual poetry prize from the Boston literary journal Audience. She won an appointment as a Radcliffe Scholar in 1961. While To Bedlam and PartWay Back was under consideration for the National Book Award, she quickly began writing the poems for her second collection, All My Pretty Ones, which received excellent reviews on its publication in 1962. In the fall of that year, Sexton won Poetry magazine’s Levinson Prize, and the following year she won a traveling fellowship sponsored by the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Over the course of the next decade, according to her biographer Diane Middlebrook, Sexton’s work won “most of the prizes, honors, awards, and fellowships available to American poets” (193). She continued to extend the boundaries of her achievements. Between 1963 and 1974 Sexton collaborated with her friend Maxine Kumin on four children’s books. Her 1967 collection of poems, Live or Die, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. This represented the high point of her critical acceptance, and her popularity among the general public continued to grow.

Despite Sexton’s writing success, she continued to suffer from mental instability, surviving several more bouts of depression, suicide attempts, and hospitalizations. She became dependent on a variety of medications and increasingly on alcohol to ease her nerves. As a result, family and professional relationships deteriorated, providing even more material for her poetry.

In contrast to its chaotic subject matter, Sexton’s verse, in her first collections, was carefully bound by rules of rhythm, rhyme, and meter. She claimed in interviews that when she started writing, she felt the need to harness the overflow of her emotions and experiences with strict, deliberate forms. Enclosing her experience of madness within meticulously ordered rhythms provided the poet with some control over unmanageable situations, and she enjoyed the fact that her brilliant, improbable images shocked readers and increased her popularity. Eventually, Sexton relinquished the controlled form she had cultivated in the earliest poems, and by the end of her third collection, Live or Die, even though she was still dealing with psychologically intense material, she loosened her dependence on the techniques and wrote in free verse. In 1967, as part of a pilot program, Sexton took a position teaching English literature at a Massachusetts high school despite her lack of a college degree.

Throughout her life other writers mentored her, and she read literature voraciously to make up for having a spotty background in the subject. In 1968 she was awarded an honorary Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard, the first time a woman had ever been selected to join that chapter. In 1969 she published Love Poems; continued to work on her play, Mercy Street; and began teaching a seminar in poetry at Boston University. In 1971 she earned a full professorship at Boston University and published Transformations, 17 updated adaptations of the Grimm Brothers’ fairy tales.

These poems show Sexton’s shift from the self-obsessed poetry of psychotherapy to an ironic assessment of the wider consequences of women’s roles. In her cynical, often humorous retellings, Sexton peppers the traditional stories with unexpected images from popular culture, while exploring her themes of madness, expectations, love, and death. Cinderella’s stepsisters have “hearts like blackjacks,” the sooty Cinderella herself looks “like Al Jolson,” and the prince’s ball is “a marriage market.” She updates the Grimms’ tales faithfully but surprisingly, often telling us in the narrator’s wise voice what life has taught her: Happily ever after is a fraud. In 1972 Sexton published her sixth collection of poems, The Book of Folly, followed by The Death Notebooks in 1974 and The Awful Rowing toward God, posthumously, in 1975. Additional work, including her play Mercy Street, was published after Sexton died of carbon monoxide poisoning, at her own hand, in 1974.

From an early age Sexton had shown an interest in performing. Through the 1960s and early 1970s, as her poetry became more popular, she became a professional performer, teaching, giving readings, and eventually traveling with her own “chamber rock” group, “Anne Sexton and Her Kind.” She referred to herself as an actress, and in 1958 she wrote, “I suspect that I have no self so I produce a different one for different people.” Though these “multiple selves” did not assuage her mental confusion, they did feed her rich, dramatic poetry.

By creating the personae of her poems, Sexton was able to try on an assortment of roles and explore the voices of her subjects in ways that were both biographically and psychologically revealing. Because of her bold, accessible writing, she earned a large contemporary audience as well as a place among the notable poets of the mid-20th century. Fearlessly writing of her own mental, physical, and spiritual struggles, holding back nothing, she conveyed vitality, wit, and sensuality to a widespread readership. Her ability to create startlingly apt images led her poetry to achieve the goal she, quoting Franz Kafka, asks of it in the introduction to her second collection: They “serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” In the 21st century Sexton’s poetry continues to reach her audience with the clear voice of a woman passionate about life, love, and death.