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 often drew on her experiences with mental illness, including bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation, as well as aspects of her personal life. She was known for blending fairy tales, mythology, and religious imagery with autobiographical themes. Sexton’s work continues to be widely read and studied for its emotional intensity and lasting influence on contemporary American poetry. After her death, one of her daughters has alleged abuse in accounts discussed in some later biographies and scholarship.
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. It is known that Sexton's parents were often abusive.
In 1945 she enrolled at Rogers Hall boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts, later spending a year at Garland School. She lived with her great aunt 'Nanna' whom Sexton considered her "greatest confidante", though she was also institutionalised. 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. Sexton had her first child, Linda Gray Sexton, in 1953. Her second child, Joyce Ladd Sexton, was born two years later. Shortly after, she had her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital. She continued to suffer with her mental health for the remainder of her life.
After giving birth to her daughter Linda in 1953, Sexton started to suffer from postpartum depression and symptoms of bipolar disorder which was diagnosed in 1954. After the birth of her second daughter, Joy, in 1955, her postpartum depression worsened and she attempted suicide for the first time, which resulted in her being institutionalised in Westwood Lodge in 1956. There, she met Dr Martin Orne, who became her psychiatrist for the next 8 years. He suggested that she write poetry as an outlet for her struggles, telling her 'You can't kill yourself; you have something to give. Why, if people read your poems' [...] they would think, "There's somebody else like me!" They wouldn't feel alone.' Between January and December 1957, Sexton brought Orne 60 poems.
In 1957, Sexton attended her first communal poetry workshop at the Boston Centre for Adult Education run by John Holmes. She felt great trepidation about attending the class as she felt she was incomparable to many there as she had no formal training in poetry; she called her friend and asked her to come with her. To her surprise, a number of her poems were featured in magazines by Saturday Review, Harper’s Magazine and in The New Yorker, one of which being "Sunbathers" in their June 13, 1959 issue. In the fall of 1958, Sexton began attending Robert Lowell's poetry seminar held at Boston University where she met him and later Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck in 1959.
Sexton’s first poetry collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960, and explored the taboos surrounding mental illness. An extensive collection along with the poem "Her Kind" was published, exploring the vilification and oppression women faced through the image of witches.
Sexton and Plath's relationship was short-lived due to Plath's death in 1963. Lowell observed, when they were both in his class, that they could benefit from one and other, “the tightly controlled Plath could benefit from Sexton's "looseness." When Plath died, Sexton expressed profound feelings of grief, jealousy and betrayal to Orne, saying "Sylvia's death disturbs me. Makes me want it too. She took something that was mine, that death was mine! Of course it was hers too. But we both swore off it, the way you swear off smoking." To honour their friendship, Sexton wrote 'Sylvia's Death', which was first published in 1963 in TriQuarterly magazine, before being published in her Pulitzer Prize-winning collection, Live or Die, in 1966.
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. 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. She 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 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. Sexton also collaborated with the artist Barbara Swan, who illustrated several of her books.
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.
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). Later that day, she committed suicide at the age of 45.
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.
Her funeral was at St. Paul's Church in Dedham, Massachusetts. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery & Crematory in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts.
Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet due to the intimate and emotional content of her poetry. Sexton often wrote about her struggles with mental illness. Topics regarded at the time as obscene and repulsive, especially when referred to by women often appeared in her verse. "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." wrote Maxine Kumin in . They met at a poetry workshop in Boston in 1957. Sexton was one of the many poets who popularised confessional poetry. Sexton's poetry was described as "unflinching in the way it dealt with mental illness, a subject not often discussed in "polite society"".
Although Sexton was labelled as a confessional poet, she described herself as a "storyteller", "who understood the difference between poetic and literal truth". This illustrates to her audience that, Sexton does use her own personal experiences and pain, she also makes the experience subjective, and transforms it into an art. This can be seen in all of her poetry, but more specifically 'Letter Written on a Ferry Whilst Crossing Long Island Sound'.
Despite society's reservations about discussing these taboo topics that appear in Sexton's work, she continued on to write about these taboos, and her third book "Live or Die" - which was based on her journey of recovery from mental illness - was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. This emphasises how Sexton was such a transformative poet, as she helped shaped and transform confessional poetry.
It could be said that Sexton used poetry to try to handle her depression, breakdowns, and her complex relationships, which is precisely what makes her work so eye-opening and gripping. Initially, it was her psychiatrist who encouraged her to utilise poetry as a coping mechanism to purge her feelings. This suggestion led to the creation of "You, Doctor Martin", which highlights her experiences in a psychiatric hospital.