Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton (born Anne Gray Harvey; November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was
an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won
the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Her poetry details her
long battle with bipolar disorder, suicidal tendencies, and intimate details from her
private life, including relationships with her husband and children, whom it was later
alleged she physically and sexually assaulted.
Early life and family[edit]
Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray
(Staples) Harvey (1901–1959) and Ralph Churchill Harvey (1900–1959). She had
two older sisters, Jane Elizabeth (Harvey) Jealous (1923–1983) and Blanche Dingley
(Harvey) Taylor (1925–2011). She spent most of her childhood in Boston. In 1945
she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts, later
spending a year at Garland School.[2] For a time she modeled for Boston's Hart
Agency. On August 16, 1948, she married Alfred Muller Sexton II and they remained
together until 1973.[3][4] Sexton had her first child, Linda Gray Sexton, in 1953. Her
second child, Joyce Ladd Sexton, was born two years later.
Poetry[edit]
Sexton suffered from severe bipolar disorder for much of her life, her first manic
episode taking place in 1954. After a second episode in 1955 she met Dr. Martin
Orne, who became her long-term therapist at the Glenside Hospital. It was Orne who
encouraged her to write poetry.[5]
The first poetry workshop she attended was led by John Holmes. Sexton felt great
trepidation about registering for the class, asking a friend to make the phone call and
accompany her to the first session. She found early acclaim with her poems; a
number were accepted by The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and the Saturday
Review. Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside
poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck.[4][6]
Sexton later paid homage to her friendship with Plath in the 1963 poem "Sylvia's
Death". Her first volume of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in
1960, and included the poem "Her Kind", which uses the persecution of witches as
an analogy for the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.[7]
Sexton's poetic career was encouraged by her mentor W. D. Snodgrass, whom she
met at the Antioch Writer's Conference in 1957. His poem "Heart's Needle" proved
inspirational for her in its theme of separation from his three-year-old daughter.
[8]
Sexton first read the poem at a time when her own young daughter was living with
her 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.[citation needed]
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 four 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 collaborated
with musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called Her Kind that added music to her
poetry. Her play Mercy Street, starring Marian Seldes, was produced in 1969 after
several years of revisions.[9] Sexton also collaborated with the artist Barbara Swan,
who illustrated several of her books.[10]
Within 12 years of writing her first sonnet, she was among the most honored poets in
the U.S.: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the
first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.[11][12]
Death[edit]
Grave of Anne Sexton, located at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain,
Massachusetts
On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with 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, ending her life by carbon monoxide poisoning.[13]
In an interview over a year before her death, she explained she had written the first
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.
Content and themes of work[edit]
Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet due to the intimate and
emotional content of her poetry. Sexton often wrote and disclosed her struggles with
mental illness through her work. Sexton included numerous obscene and repulsive
topics, especially for women to talk about publicly at the time. Maxine Kumin
described Sexton's work: "She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion,
masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties
embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry."[14]
Sexton's work towards the end of the 1960s has been criticized as "preening, lazy
and flip" by otherwise respectful critics.[11] 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."[15]
Her eighth collection of poetry is entitled The Awful Rowing Toward God. The title
came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, 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.[16]
Her work started out as being about herself, however as her career progressed she
made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes.
[17]
Transformations (1971), which is a re-visionary re-telling of Grimm's Fairy Tales,
is one such book.[18]
(Transformations was used as the libretto for the 1973 opera of the same name by
American composer Conrad Susa.) Later she used Christopher Smart's Jubilate
Agno and the Bible as the basis for some of her work.[19]
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. 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."[6]
Subsequent controversy[edit]
Following one of many suicide attempts and manic or depressive episodes, Sexton
worked with therapist Martin Orne.[11] 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.[20] 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.[21] This abuse was disputed in interviews with
her mother and other relatives.[22]
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."[23] According to
Orne, Sexton was extremely suggestible and would mimic the symptoms of the
patients around her in the mental hospitals to which she was committed. Diane
Middlebrook's biography states that a separate personality named Elizabeth
emerged in Sexton while under hypnosis. Orne did not encourage this development
and subsequently this "alternate personality" disappeared. Orne eventually
concluded that Anne Sexton was suffering from hysteria.[5]
During the writing of the Middlebrook biography, her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton,
stated that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother.[21][24] In 1994, she
published her autobiography Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My
Mother, Anne Sexton, which includes her own accounts of the abuse.[25][26]
Middlebrook published her controversial biography of Anne Sexton with the approval
of daughter Linda, Anne's literary executor.[5] For use in the biography, 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".[11] 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 The 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
molestation of her daughter Linda,[27][26] her physically violent behavior toward both
her daughters, and her physical altercations with her husband.[24]
Further controversy surrounds allegations that she had an "affair with" the therapist
who replaced Orne in the 1960s.[28]
No action was taken to censure or discipline the second therapist. Orne considered
the "affair" with the second therapist (given the pseudonym "Ollie Zweizung" by
Middlebrook and Linda Sexton) to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her
suicide.[6]
Legacy[edit]
Peter Gabriel dedicated his song "Mercy Street" (named for her play Mercy
Street and inspired by his reading of her poem "45 Mercy Street") from his 1986
album So to Sexton.[29] She has been described as a "personal touchstone"
for Morrissey, former lead singer and lyricist of The Smiths.[30] She is commemorated
on the Boston Women's Heritage Trail.[31]
