Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts–October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) was an influential American poet and writer known for her highly personal, confessional poetry. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her long battle with depression. After repeated attempts, she took her own life in 1974.
Early Life and Family
Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts to Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Harvey. She spent most of her childhood in Boston. In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school, Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland School.[1] 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]
Poetry
For much of her adult life 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 long-term therapist at the Glenside Hospital. He encouraged her to take up poetry.[4]
The first 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 the first session. 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 later 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” proved inspirational for her in its theme of separation from his three year old daughter. She first 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 also became good friends and remained so for 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, 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. (Musician Peter Gabriel wrote a song inspired by Sexton's work, also titled "Mercy Street".)
Within 12 years of writing her first sonnet "she was one of the most honored poets in America: 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"[6]
Death
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, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.[7]
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.
Content and themes of work
Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Her work encompasses issues specific to women such as menstruation, abortion, and more broadly masturbation and adultery, before such subjects were commonly addressed in poetic discourse.
Sexton's work has been criticized as being non-intellectual and non-rigorous by her writing peers.[8] Her work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as "preening, lazy and flip" by otherwise respectful critics.[6] 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 [...]."[9]
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 centre on the theme of dying. [10]
Her work started out as being about herself, [11] however as her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes.[11] Transformations is one such book that attempts to use Grimm's fairy tales as the source for her poetry.[citation needed] Later she used Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno [12] and the Bible as the basis for some of her work.
In the analysis of Sexton's 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. Denise Levertov says, "we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction."[5]
As one of the most famous, modern confessional poets she is often celebrated for the honest gaze of her work. Although she was largely self taught[citation needed] and had never graduated from college, by the end of her life she had garnered a Pulitzer Prize[13], fellowships and honorary doctorates.
Subsequent controversy
Following one of many suicide attempts and breakdowns [6] she worked with therapist Dr. Orne. He diagnosed her with what is now described as bipolar disorder,[citation needed] but his competence to do so is called into question by his early use of allegedly unsound psychotherapeutic techniques. During sessions with Sexton he used hypnosis and sodium pentothal to recover supposedly repressed memories. During this process he allegedly used suggestion to implant false memories of childhood sexual abuse. This abuse was refuted in interviews with her mother and other relatives.[14]. However during the writing of Sexton's biography, Sexton's daughter, Linda Gray Sexton confirmed to the book's author that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother. [15]
There is much controversy over the recovery of repressed memories as a useful modality. 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".[16]. According to Dr. Orne, Anne Sexton was extremely suggestible and would mimic the symptoms of the patients around her in the mental hospitals she was committed. Dr. Orne eventually concluded that Anne Sexton was suffering from hysteria.[4]
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.
When Diane Middlebrook published her biography of Anne Sexton (with the approval of Sexton's daughter and literary executor, Linda) it attracted large amounts of controversy.[4] For use in the biography, Dr. Orne had given Diane Middlebrook most of the tapes recording the therapy sessions between Orne and Sexton. The use of these tapes was met with, as the New York Times puts it, "thunderous condemnation" [6]. As she received the tapes after she had written a substantial amount of the first draft of Sexton's biography, Middlebrook decided to start over. Sexton's family expressed strong opinions, both for and against the Middlebrook biography, in several editorials and op-ed pieces, mainly 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 inappropriate behavior with her daughter Linda, her physically violent behavior towards her daughters and her physical altercations with her husband.[15]
Yet more controversy surrounded allegations that Sexton had had an affair with the therapist who replaced Dr. Orne in the sixties [17]. No action was taken to censure or discipline the second therapist. Dr. Orne considered the affair with the second therapist (given the pseudonym "Ollie Zweizung" by Middlebrook,[5] and Linda Sexton) to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her suicide. [18]
Awards
- Audience magazine's annual poetry prize (1959)
- Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize (1962)
- National Book Award nomination for All My Pretty Ones (1963)
- American Academy of Arts and Letters' traveling fellowship (1963)
- Ford Foundation grant (1963)
- Shelley Memorial Prize for Live or Die (1967)
- Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Live or Die (1967)
- Guggenheim Foundation grant (1969)
- Tufts University's Doctor of Letters (1970)
- Crashaw Chair in Literature from Colgate University (1972)
Bibliography
Poetry and Prose
- Uncompleted Novel-started in the 1960s
- To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
- All My Pretty Ones (1962)
- Live or Die (1966) - Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1967
- Love Poems (1969)
- Mercy Street, a 2-act play performed at the American Place Theatre (1969)
- Transformations (1971) ISBN 0-618-08343-X
- The Book of Folly (1972)
- The Death Notebooks (1974)
- The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975; posthumous)
- 45 Mercy Street (1976; posthumous)
- Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977; posthumous)
- Words for Dr. Y. (1978; posthumous)
- No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, edited by Steven E. Colburn (1985; posthumous)
Children's books
all co-written with Maxine Kumin
- 1963 Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
- 1964 More Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
- 1974 Joey and the Birthday Present (illustrated by Evaline Ness)
- 1975 The Wizard's Tears (illustrated by Evaline Ness)
References
- ^ Middlebrook, p. 21.
- ^ 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.
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ a b c Middlebrook
- ^ a b c 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.
- ^ a b c d 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.
- ^ Hendin, Herbert (Fall 1993). "The Suicide of Anne Sexton". Suicide and Life-Threatening Behavior 23 (3): 257-62.
- ^ Oates, Joyce Carol (2007). Johnson, Greg. ed. The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Harper Collins. p. 205. ISBN 978-0061227981.
- ^ 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/books?id=0e4lAAAACAAJ.
- ^ "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.
- ^ a b 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…"
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Middlebrook, p. 56-60.
- ^ a b 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ 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.
- ^ Insert footnote text here
Further reading
- Sexton, Linda Gray (1994). Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother. Little, Brown & Co.. ISBN 978-0316782074.
- McGowan, Philip (2004). Anne Sexton & Middle Generation Poetry: The Geography of Grief. Praeger Publishers. ISBN 978-0313315145.
- Salvio, Paula M. (2007). Anne Sexton: teacher of weird abundance. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ISBN 978-0791470978. OCLC 70684774.
- Gill, Jo (2007). Anne Sexton’s Confessional Poetics. University Press of Florida. ISBN 978-0813031750.
- Middlebrook, Diane Wood (1991). Anne Sexton: A Biography. Reprinted by Vintage Books, 1992. ISBN 0679741828
External links
