Anne Sexton.
A contemporary American poet, Anne Sexton, holds an indispensable position among renowned poets. She used her personal despondency to inspire her poetic works and was best recognized for the inexorably autobiographical traits of her poetry. She suffered from severe mental ailments throughout her life, with an obsession with suicide, and received therapeutic treatment from a psychiatrist three times a week for most of her life (Kendall, 2005). The present paper presents her biographical details and the impact of her psychosomatic dilemmas on her life and writing career. She created highly emotional, self-reflexive verses characterized by worries of her childhood guilt, psychological sickness, motherhood, and female sexuality. These poetic expressions are notable for their dazzling imagery, artistry, and outstanding rhythm.
Anne Sexton was born on November 9, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts, and was the youngest of three daughters born to wealthy parents. At the age of 6, Anne attended public schools and continued until the age of 17. After that, her parents sent her to Rogers Hall, a preparatory school for girls in Lowell, Massachusetts, because they observed that her behavior was quite different from that of a normal child. They hoped that she would come out of her wild nature and become a normal and mentally sound woman. At this time, Anne first started to compose poetry, which was published in the school yearbook. However, she received negative feedback from her mother, who was from a writer’s family. Her mother indicted Anne for breaching copyright and did not believe that her daughter had the hidden talent to compile such touchy, inspiring, and lovely poetry. With some minor changes in her distorted feminine personality, Anne attended the Garland School in Boston, a finishing school for women. One can always find that there must be some inspiration or major facts behind an individual that leads to success. In the case of Sexton, her writing was the result of an emotional collapse that led to severe melancholy (Middlebrook, pg: 4-16). She was continuously struggling to overcome depression and was looking for counseling to get rid of depressive feelings. In 1948, Anne got married to Alfred Muller Sexton II, regardless of the fact that she was betrothed to another man during that time (Middlebrooke, pg: 20-23). She gave birth to her second child, Joyce Ladd Sexton, while she was getting counseling from her counselor. In 1956, Anne’s mental condition deteriorated to the extent that she was hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital for the first time in her life. At that time, she tried to commit suicide but failed. The same year, she started writing poetry once again with encouragement from her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin. But Anne never recovered from depression and attempted suicide again in May 1957. These suicidal tendencies were a reflection of her severe mental state, and she had to shelter in a psychiatric clinic. She continued to write poetry through her inner drive, and her creations became very popular. In August, she received a scholarship to the Antioch Writers’ Conference. She suffered from immense depression and had a long-lasting relationship with her psychiatrist, Martin Orne. Her life was very difficult during this period. The major battle of her life was bipolar disorder, which she spoke about in her poetry. Her psychiatrist, Orne, always encouraged her to write with the intention that her engagement in composing verse may lessen her emotional depressive feelings and continuously prompted her to compose whatever comes to her mind and not to crush life with mental barriers. He made an effort to realize her that her write-ups might have great importance to the populace in the future.
Sexton was deeply involved in the writing profession in 1957 and published To Bedlam and Part Way Back” in 1960. She received great praise for the collection, which was her first book (Middlebrook, Pg: 4-16). Her writings reflected her mental state and depressive thoughts. Sexton selected topics that were previously unknown in poetry, such as abortion, menstruation, and the attraction of suicide. She shamelessly wrote about herself on topics that some found challenging and unsuitable for poetry. Her life was guarded by a psychiatrist and counselor. Her advisor, W.D. Snodgrass, whom she met at the Antioch Writer’s Conference in 1957, encouraged her to express her inner bitterness and experiences in poetic form. She understood the fictitious urge, the writing theme the writer uses for actuality and the imagination in conception. She used her awareness of the human state, sometimes throbbing but often delightful, to create poems. Sexton achieved good repute for her insightful metaphors, the unexpected rhythms of her stanzas, and her ability to grasp a variety of meanings in accurate words (Linda, 1989). Sexton had an inner talent for twisting metaphors and similes as a technique in her writing, which transformed her poems and influenced her readers. She used metaphors in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” which contributed to the blustery modern sound. Sexton transformed her poems into effervescent multicolored images in the brain by using bright colors as a different technique in her writing. One more imaginative, ghastly quote she used in “Godfather Death” is “His white head hung out like a carpet bag, and his crotch turned blue as a blood blister, and Godfather Death, as it is written, put a finger on his back for the big blackout, the big no.” Such as “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” the quote explains through so many words that Snow White’s beauty surpasses the once beautiful but aged queen, and she cannot have that happen (Sexton Love Poems, Pg: 181-182). She used symbolic imagery in the majority of her poems, which were insightful, meditative, and mature, offering newly redolent and unforgettable images that were most frequently articulated in her poetry. Her writings, such as in “Love Poems,” “Live and Die,” and “Transformations,” intended to explain to readers the whole work of imperative mid-century American poets. She also worked with some musical groups to put several of her writing styles to melody.
Her career was greatly affected by the frenzied aspects of Sexton’s infirmity in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She created her poetry and published work under such grave circumstances. While she wrote to chuck out mental problems, depression, and the seclusion experienced with mental illness were still prominent. Her creation Her Kind” discovers the internal setup of a depressed psyche and reflects what women countenance in a male-dominated society. She has written poems mainly in the first person. Each verse of her poem portrays females in their diverse roles while at the same time mentioning the remoteness of poor mental health (Middlebrook, pg: 114). Sexton expressed herself in such a way that some powerful force was controlling her, which made her intrinsically wicked. These were all due to her depressive state of mind. Sexton wrote a poem entitled “Wanting to Die” in 1964, which is tremendously emotional (Parini, pg: 646-647).
Sexton made an extreme effort to win the Pulitzer Prize. She was awarded the Audience Poetry Prize in 1959. After receiving this award, Anne published her first manuscript of poetry entitled To Bedlam and Part Way Back.” With this publication, Anne gained national recognition for her work. Her second book, “All My Pretty Ones,” was published in 1962. These works pushed her to write more insightfully, and she continued her achievements by working on four children’s books with her friend Maxine Kumin. Sexton shared her ideas and early drafts of poems with Kumin. She produced her best work in “All My Pretty Ones” (1962), which features an epigraph from Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Anne toured Europe on a traveling fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1963. Though she enjoyed the trip, her emotional outbursts and mental illness made her life worse. In 1964, she consulted a new psychiatrist who treated Anne’s depression by prescribing the drug Thorazine, and she was released from the hospital. This change of treatment temporarily relieved her. “Transformations” was her distinguished work, which was published in 1971. In these verses, she tried to explain some renowned Grimm’s fairy tales from the standpoint of “a middle-aged witch, me,” generating some comic moments and surprising endings that are not part of the original tales. Sexton published seven poetry compilations in her lifetime, even though she stayed in a mental hospital and underwent therapeutic treatment. Throughout her life, she struggled to tackle her own marital betrayal and the troubles associated with being a female poet in a male-dominated genre. She reproduced these feelings by combining the thesis of despair with the roles of women in society. She wanted to communicate the unformulated conception of dejection through her poetic expression. She found a way to extend her life by expressing her inner thoughts in the face of the wish to commit suicide, which concerned, purposefully, the creation of metaphor (Kendall, pg: 87).
Although she reflected her own thoughts and sufferings, her creations are greatly praised by readers for the powerful metaphors, persuasive associations, sentimental melancholic tone, and scrupulously arranged tonal patterns of her best poetry. She gained all-around appreciation for her work. However, this fame did not make her a stable or normal woman capable of surviving and leading a normal married life. Anne Sexton was ambitious and enthusiastic. She had a feeling of disagreement regarding the desires to live or to die (Middlebrook, pg: 4-16). Sexton is renowned as a noteworthy American poet of the postwar era for her deep talent. She left such a profound impact on the American public that she is considered one of the most gifted representatives of the first generation of confessional poets, alongside Lowell and Plath. Reviewers analyzed her work as a reflection of the dual nature and as a healing process and disparaging urge. But promoters viewed her poetry as a good initiative and daring step to transform excruciating experiences and outlawed topics into art. Opponents did not appreciate such matters as exhibitionist and strongly condemned them. James Dickey quoted Sexton’s poems in his now-famous review of To Bedlam and Part Way Back, “One feels tempted to drop them furtively into the nearest ashcan, rather than be caught with them in the presence of such naked suffering.” Sexton’s work was criticized by many opponents for discriminating philosophical archetypal motifs in her work, particularly citations to the Oedipus myth in themes of incest and the inexorable search for illegal truth and her intricate handling of her own search for saintly meaning in The Awful Rowing Toward God. She made her strong position in the line of notable poets regardless of all these criticisms. She had a dominating personality and was a very attractive woman. Before writing poetry, she was involved in modeling for a short period and had many fans. Several fans had an opinion of her that she was a movie star first and recognized as a poet second. She made a huge contribution to society by expressing her bitter emotional thoughts in the form of poetry. She could not conquer her mental ailments and committed suicide on October 4, 1974.
To sum up, Sexton continually achieved success as a poet until her last breath (Wagner-Martin). The emotional disturbances she faced throughout her life are reflected in her poetic expressions, making Sexton an eminent and esteemed poet. Today, people appreciate her brilliant work and find inspiration in it. Her constant depressions are revealed in her poetry, which ultimately led to her taking her own life. She articulated her personal torment in verse, exploring the depths of her mind and society. She was very frank in writing about private feminine matters, such as menstruation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction, at a time when these topics were not allowed in poetry. Sexton’s later works focused on common references to mythology, fairy tales, and Christian motifs, and explored topics such as quixotic love, motherhood, and relationships between the sexes. It can be said that her mental sufferings boosted her career as a poet, and she continues to live on among all her admirers.
Works Cited
1) Kendall Charity. Journal Title: Journal of Evolutionary Psychology. Volume: 26. Issue: 1-2. Publication Year: 2005. Page Number: 87.
2) Wagner-Martin, Linda. Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey.” 13 November 2001. http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01490-print.html
3) Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991.
4) Sexton, Anne. “Her Kind.” In Kennedy, X.J. and Dana Gioia, eds., Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama, 8th ed., New York: Longman, 2002, p. 770.
5) Parini, Jay. Editor. The Columbia Anthology of American Poetry. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995.
6) Kumin, Maxine. Foreword. The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1999. xix.
