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Anne Sexton

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Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 - October 4, 1974) was an influential American poet, known for her highly personal confessional poetry.

Sexton

Anne Sexton (1928-1974), photographed by Elsa Dorfman

Anne Sexton
Born November 9, 1928(1928-Template:MONTHNUMBER-09)
Newton, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died October 4, 1974(1974-Template:MONTHNUMBER-04) (aged 45)
Weston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Occupation Poet
Nationality United States American
Genres confessional poetry
Children Linda Gray Sexton, Joyce Ladd Sexton

Life[]

Youth and education[]

Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray (Staples) and Ralph Harvey.[1]

She spent most of her childhood in Boston.[1]

In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland Junior College.[1]

Private life[]

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] She had 2 children named Linda Gray and Joyce Ladd.

Literary career[]

Sexton suffered from severe mental illness for much of her life. Her earliest manic episode took place in 1954. After a 2nd 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 original 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 her 1st session. After the workshop Sexton experienced remarkably quick success with her poetry: her poems were accepted by The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the Saturday Review.

Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell[5] at Boston University alongside 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"[6] proved inspirational for her in its theme of separation from his 3-year-old daughter. She 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 became good friends and remained so for the rest of Sexton's life. Kumin and Sexton rigorously critiqued each other's work, and wrote 4 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. [7]

Death[]

File:AnneSextonGrave.jpg

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, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.[8]

In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the earliest drafts of The Awful 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. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.

Later controversy[]

Following 1 of her many suicide attempts and manic or depressive episodes, Sexton had worked with therapist Dr. Martin Orne.[9] He diagnosed her with what is now described as bipolar disorder, but his competence to do so is called into question by his early use of allegedly unsound psychotherapeutic techniques.[10] During sessions with Sexton he used hypnosis and sodium pentothal to recover supposedly repressed memories. During this process, he allegedly used suggestion to uncover memories of having been abused by her father.[11]This abuse was disputed in interviews with her mother and other relatives.[12] 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."[13] 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. 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. Dr. Orne eventually concluded that Anne Sexton was suffering from hysteria.[4] During the writing of the Middlebrook biography, Linda Gray Sexton stated that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother.[14] [11]In 1994, Linda Gray Sexton published her autobiography, Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, which includes her own accounts of the abuse.[15][16]

Middlebrook published her controversial biography of Anne Sexton with the approval of Linda Gray Sexton, Anne's literary executor.[4] For use in the biography, Dr. Orne had given Diane Middlebrook most of the tapes recording the therapy sessions between Orne and Anne Sexton. The use of these tapes was met with, as The New York Times put it, "thunderous condemnation."[9] Middlebrook received the tapes after she had written a substantial amount of the first draft of Sexton's biography, and decided to start over. Although Linda Gray Sexton collaborated with the Middlebrook biography, other members of the Sexton family were divided over the book, publishing several editorials and op-ed pieces, in the New York Times and 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 both her daughters, and her physical altercations with her husband.[14] Template:Dead link

Yet more controversy surrounded allegations that Anne Sexton had an affair with the therapist who replaced Dr. Orne in the 1960s.[17] No action was taken to censure or discipline the 2nd therapist. Orne considered the affair with the 2nd therapist (given the pseudonym "Ollie Zweizung" by Middlebrook and Linda Sexton) to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her suicide.[5]

Writing[]

Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Themes of her poetry include her suicidal tendencies, her long battle against major depression and anorexia nervosa, and various intimate details from her own private life, including her relationship with her husband and children. Aside from her standard themes of depression, isolation, suicide, and despair, her work also encompasses issues specific to women, such as menstruation and abortion — and more broadly, masturbation and adultery — before such subjects were commonly addressed in poetic discourse.

Her work towards the end of the 1960s has been criticized as "preening, lazy and flip" by otherwise respectful critics.[9] 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 [...]."[18]

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 center on the theme of dying.[19]

Her work started out as being about herself.[20] However, as her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes.[20] Transformations (1971), a re-telling of Grimm's Fairy Tales, is such a book.[21] Later she used Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno[22] and the Bible as the basis for some of her 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. Levertov says, "we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction."[5]

Recognition[]

Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry in 1967.

Within 12 years of writing her earliest sonnet, Sexton was among the most honored poets in America: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and the 1st female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa[9][23]

In popular culture[]

Sexton's book Transformations was used as the libretto for the 1973 opera of the same name by American composer Conrad Susa.

Publications[]

Poetry[]

  • To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Boston: Houghton, 1960.
  • All My Pretty Ones. Boston: Houghton, 1962.
  • Selected Poems. Oxford University Press, 1964.
  • Live or Die. Boston: Houghton, 1966.
  • Poems (by Douglas Livingstone, Thomas Kinsella, & Anne Sexton). London & New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.
  • Love Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1969.
  • Transformations. Boston: Houghton, 1971.
  • The Book of Folly. Boston: Houghton, 1972.
  • O Ye Tongues. Rainbow Press, 1973.
  • The Death Notebooks. Boston: Houghton, 1974.
  • The Awful Rowing toward God. Boston: Houghton, 1975.
  • 45 Mercy Street. Boston: Houghton, 1976.
  • The Heart of Anne Sexton's Poetry (contains All My Pretty Ones, Live or Die, and Love Poems). (3 volumes), Boston: Houghton, 1977.
  • Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected poems, with three stories (edited by L.G. Sexton). Boston: Houghton, 1978.
  • Complete Poems, 1981. Boston: Houghton, 1981.
  • Selected Poems of Anne Sexton (edited by Diane W. Middlebrook & Diana H. George). Boston: Houghton, 1988.
  • Love Poems of Anne Sexton (introduction by Diane W. Middlebrook). Boston: Houghton, 1989.

Non-fiction[]

Juvenile[]

(with Maxine W. Kumin)
  • Eggs of Things. New York: Putnam, 1963.
  • More Eggs of Things. New York: Putnam, 1964.
  • Joey and the Birthday Present. New York: McGraw, 1971.
  • The Wizard's Tears. New York: McGraw, 1975.

Letters[]

  • Anne Sexton: A self-portrait in letters (edited by L.G. Sexton & Lois Ames). Boston: Houghton, 1977.


Except where noted, bibliographical information courtesy the Poetry Foundation.[24]

Anne_Sexton_at_home_reading_Wanting_to_Die

Anne Sexton at home reading Wanting to Die

Plays[]

  • Mercy Street (first produced Off-Broadway at American Place Theatre, October 11, 1969)[24]

See also[]


v · d · ePulitzer Prize in Poetry, 1951–1975
Carl Sandburg (1951)  • Marianne Moore (1952)  • Archibald MacLeish (1953)  • Theodore Roethke (1954)  • Wallace Stevens (1955)  • Elizabeth Bishop (1956)  • Richard Wilbur (1957)  • Robert Penn Warren (1958)  • Stanley Kunitz (1959)  • W.D. Snodgrass (1960)  • Phyllis McGinley (1961)  • Alan Dugan (1962)  • William Carlos Williams (1963)  • Louis Simpson (1964)  • John Berryman (1965)  • Richard Eberhart (1966)  • Anne Sexton (1967)  • * Anthony Hecht (1968)  • George Oppen (1969)  • Richard Howard (1970)  • W.S. Merwin (1971)  • James Wright (1972)  • Maxine Kumin (1973)  • Robert Lowell (1974)  • Gary Snyder (1975)
 • Complete list  • (1918-1950)  • (1951-1975)  • (1976-2000)  • (2001-2025)  •

References[]

Anne_Sexton_reads_'Her_Kind'_1966

Anne Sexton reads 'Her Kind' 1966

Anne_Sexton_reading_her_poem_"All_My_Pretty_Ones"

Anne Sexton reading her poem "All My Pretty Ones"

Fonds[]

Notes[]

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 Middlebrook, p. 21.
  2. ↑ Nelson, Cary (2008-08-27). "Anne Sexton Chronology". Modern American Poetry website. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sexton/chrono.htm. Retrieved 2009-02-20. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 Morris, Tim (1999-04-23). "A Brief Biography of the Life of Anne Sexton". University of Texas at Arlington. http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/poetry/as/bio1.html. Retrieved 2009-02-20. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 Middlebrook
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 Carroll, James (Fall 1992). "Review: ‘Anne Sexton: A Biography’". Ploughshares 18 (58). http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleid=3360. Retrieved 2009-01-18.  Template:Dead link
  6. ↑ Snodgrass, W. D., "Heart's Needle", American Academy of Poets
  7. ↑ (Musician Peter Gabriel wrote a song inspired by Sexton's work, also titled "Mercy Street".)
  8. ↑ Hendin, Herbert (Fall 1993). "The Suicide of Anne Sexton". Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 23 (3): 257–62. PMID 8249036. 
  9. ↑ 9.0 9.1 9.2 9.3 Pollitt, Katha (1991-18-08). "The Death Is Not the Life". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1991/08/18/books/the-death-is-not-the-life.html. Retrieved 2009-01-09. 
  10. ↑ Jamison, K.R., "Manic-depressive illness and creativity". Scientific American, February 1995, pp. 68–73
  11. ↑ 11.0 11.1 Imagining Incest: Sexton, Plath, Rich, and Olds on Life with Daddy (2003) Gale Swiontkowski, Susquehanna University Press, p26 ISBN 9781575910611
  12. ↑ Middlebrook, pp. 56–60.
  13. ↑ Nagourney, Eric (2000-02-17). "Martin Orne, 76, Psychiatrist And Expert on Hypnosis, Dies". The New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/02/17/us/martin-orne-72-psychiatrist-and-expert-on-hypnosis-dies.html. Retrieved 2009-01-06. 
  14. ↑ 14.0 14.1 Hausman, Ken (1991-09-06). "Psychiatrist Criticized Over Release Of Poet’s Psychotherapy Tapes". The Psychiatric News. http://www.dianemiddlebrook.com/sexton/tpn9-6.html. Retrieved 2009-05-13. 
  15. ↑ Sexton, Linda Gray (1994) Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton. Little Brown & Co. ISBN 0-316-78207-6
  16. ↑ New York Times article A Daughter Revisits Sexton's Bedlam October 14, 1994. Accessed 2010-08-04
  17. ↑ Morrow, Lance (1991-09-23). "Pains of The Poet—And Miracles". TIME. http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973887-1,00.html. Retrieved 2009-01-18. 
  18. ↑ Rothenberg, Jerome; Joris, Pierre, eds (1995). Poems for the Millenium. 2. University of California Press. p. 330. ISBN 978-0520072251. OCLC 29702496. http://books.google.com/?id=0e4lAAAACAAJ. 
  19. ↑ "Anne Sexton". Poets of Cambridge, U.S.A.. Harvard Square Library. Archived from Anne Sexton the original on 2007-10-28. http://web.archive.org/web/20071028145353/http://harvardsquarelibrary.org/poets/sexton.php. 
  20. ↑ 20.0 20.1 Ostriker, Alicia (1983). Writing like a woman. University of Michigan Press. ISBN 978-0472063475. "Self was the center, self was the perimeter, of her vision..." 
  21. ↑ Del George, Dana, The Supernatural in Short Fiction of the Americas: The Other World in the New World, Greenwood Publishing Group, 2001, p. 37. ISBN 0313319391
  22. ↑ Sexton, Anne (2000). Middlebrook, Diane Wood; George, Diana Hume. eds. Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. Boston: Mariner Books. p. xvii. ISBN 978-0618057047. http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=682617. Retrieved 2009-05-13. 
  23. ↑ Wagner-Martin, Linda (2008-08-27). "Anne Sexton’s Life". Modern American Poetry website. University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sexton/sexton_life.htm. Retrieved 2009-02-02. 
  24. ↑ 24.0 24.1 Anne Sexton 1928-1974, Poetry Foundation. Web, Dec. 3, 2012.

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