Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton (born November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts, U.S.—died October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) was an American poet whose work is noted for its confessional intensity. Her poems addressed many taboo topics and explored familial and intimate relationships through the use of myths and archetypes. She won a Pulitzer Prize for her collection Live or Die (1966).

Born Anne Harvey, she attended Garland Junior College in Boston for a year before her marriage in 1948 to Alfred M. Sexton II. They had two children before divorcing in 1973. After the birth of her first child (1953), she experienced postpartum depression and was admitted to a mental hospital. On the advice of her psychiatrist, she began writing poetry.

Sexton studied with the poet Robert Lowell at Boston University and also worked as a model and a librarian. Although she had written some poetry in childhood, it was not until the later 1950s that she began to write seriously. Her poems, which showed Lowell’s influence, appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and other periodicals, and her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960. The book won immediate attention because of the intensely personal and relentlessly honest self-revelatory nature of the poems recording her depression and recovery. Their imagery was frequently brilliant, and their tone was both sardonic and vulnerable.

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Sexton’s second book of poems, All My Pretty Ones (1962), continued in the vein of uncompromising self-exploration. Live or Die, a further record of mental illness, won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for poetry and was followed by, among others, Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974).

Sexton taught at Boston University in 1970–71 and at Colgate University in 1971–72. She also wrote a number of children’s books with poet Maxine Kumin, including Eggs of Things (1963), Joey and the Birthday Present (1971), and The Wizard’s Tears (1975).

Sexton died by suicide in 1974. She is regarded as one of the major voices of confessional poetry, and her work influenced many feminist writers. The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), 45 Mercy Street (1976, edited by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton), and Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978) were published posthumously. Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, edited by Lois Ames and Linda Gray Sexton, was published in 1977 and No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews, and Prose in 1985. Searching for Mercy Street (1994) is her daughter Linda Gray Sexton’s reflection on their relationship.