What do you guys think about Anne Sexton?

Question

I am learning quite a bit about her at the moment and I was just wondering what your thoughts are about her. Anything goes, nice, not nice, anything! I just want to hear, so...go!

Answer 1

Best Answer - Chosen by Voters

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

Sexton suffered from complex mental illness. Her first manic episode took place in 1954. After a second breakdown in 1955, she met Dr. Martin Orne, who was to become her longtime therapist, at Glenside Hospital. Sexton believed she was not valuable except in her ability to please men and told Orne in her first interview that her only talent might be for prostitution. He later told her that his evaluation showed that she had a creative side and encouraged her to take up poetry.[4] Though she was very nervous about it and needed a friend to make the phone call and accompany her to the first workshop, she enrolled in her first poetry workshop with John Holmes as 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 also 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”, about his separation from his three year old daughter, encouraged her to write "The Double Image," a poem significant in expressing the multi-generational relationships existing between mother and daughter. "Heart's Needle" was particularly inspirational to Sexton because at the time she first read it her own young daughter was living with her mother-in-law. Sexton began writing letters to Snodgrass and they soon became friends. 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. In the late 1960s, 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 musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called "Her Kind" that added music to her poetry. She also wrote "Mercy Street", a play produced off-Broadway after several years of revisions in 1969. It is also interesting to note that the artist Peter Gabriel, wrote a song inspired by Sexton's work, also titled "Mercy Street".


Grave of Anne SextonOn October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to review Sexton's most recent book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. Upon returning home, she put on her mother's old fur coat, locked herself in her garage, started the engine of her car and committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.[6]

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.



Many authors having problems with mental illness have dark and light works depending on their mental health. The same is true of Anne.