Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was one of the central figures of the confessional poetry movement and one of the most powerful and controversial American poets of the twentieth century. Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, she grew up in a prosperous family and showed an early gift for words and performance. After an early marriage, the birth of two daughters, and a descent into severe mental illness, Sexton began writing poetry seriously in the late 1950s, initially at the suggestion of her therapist. She studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University, where she formed a lasting friendship with Sylvia Plath, and quickly distinguished herself as a poet of shattering emotional directness and extraordinary formal skill.
Her debut collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), brought the experience of mental illness, psychiatric hospitalization, and the fragile recovery of the self into American poetry with an unprecedented candor. Her subsequent collections consolidated and deepened her reputation: All My Pretty Ones (1962) and Live or Die (1966), the latter of which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, established her as a poet of the first rank. Transformations (1971), her darkly comic retellings of Grimm’s fairy tales, demonstrated a wit and formal range that surprised readers who knew her primarily from the confessional work. The Death Notebooks (1974) and The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975, posthumous) engaged death and spirituality with terrifying directness.
Sexton’s work was groundbreaking in its willingness to claim for women the full range of human experience — madness, sexuality, abortion, menstruation, suicide — as legitimate subjects for serious poetry. She faced considerable criticism from reviewers who found her subject matter objectionable, but she also found passionate defenders, and her influence on subsequent generations of women poets has been immense. Poets including Sharon Olds, Maxine Kumin (Sexton’s close friend and fellow poet), and countless others have acknowledged her as a crucial forerunner.
Sexton took her own life in October 1974. Her death, like that of Sylvia Plath, has sometimes obscured the full achievement of her work behind the biographical legend of the doomed confessional poet. Yet her poetry, at its best, transcends its circumstances and speaks with a directness, formal mastery, and human urgency that remain undimmed. She is an essential American poet whose work demands to be read on its own terms.