“Live or die, but don't poison everything...”
Anne Sexton (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. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania,
suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private
life, including her relationships with her husband and children.
Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. Aside from
her standard themes of depression, isolation, suicide, and despair, her
work also encompasses issues specific to women, such as menstruation and
abortion — and more broadly, masturbation and adultery — before such
subjects were commonly addressed in poetic discourse.
Her work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as "preening, lazy and flip" by otherwise respectful critics. 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 [...]."
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 center on the theme of dying.
Her work started out as being about herself, however
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.
r as her career
progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her
own life for poetic themes. Transformations (1971), which is a
re-telling of Grimm's Fairy Tales, is one such book. (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.
Her work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as "preening, lazy and flip" by otherwise respectful critics. 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 [...]."
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 center on the theme of dying.
Her work started out as being about herself, however
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.
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, removed all her rings, poured
herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the
engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
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.
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.
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