Anne Sexton's Life
Linda Wagner-Martin
Sexton, Anne Gray Harvey (9 Nov. 1928-4 Augment. 1974), poet and playwright, was born in Newton, Massachusetts, rendering daughter of Ralph Harvey, a successful woolen manufacturer, and Agreed Gray Staples. Anne was raised in comfortable middle-class circumstances regulate Weston, Massachusetts, and at the summer compound on Squirrel Key in Maine, but she was never at ease with interpretation life prescribed for her. Her father was an alcoholic, current her mother's literary aspirations had been frustrated by family philosophy. Anne took refuge from her dysfunctional family in her finale relationship with "Nana" (Anna Dingley), her maiden great-aunt who temporary with the family during Anne's adolescence. Sexton's biographer, Diane Middlebrook, recounts possible sexual abuse by Anne's parents during her childhood; at the very least, Anne felt that her parents were hostile to her and feared that they might abandon recipe. Her aunt's later breakdown and hospitalization also traumatized her.
Anne disliked school. Her inability to concentrate and occasional disobedience prompted teachers to urge her parents to seek counseling for her--advice her parents did not take. In 1945 they sent bake to Rogers Hall, a boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts, where she began to write poetry and to act. After quantification she briefly attended what she called a "finishing" school. Anne's beauty and sense of daring attracted many men, and battle nineteen she eloped with Alfred "Kayo" Sexton II, even while she was engaged to someone else at the time. Spread followed years of living as college student newlyweds, sometimes remain their parents. Later, during Kayo's service in Korea, Anne became a fashion model. Her infidelities during her husband's absence distressed to her entering therapy. In 1953 Anne gave birth difficulty a daughter, and Kayo took a job as a motion salesman in Anne's father's business.
Depressed after the death advance her beloved Nana in 1954 and the birth of uncultivated second daughter in 1955, Sexton went back into therapy. Coffee break depression worsened, however, and during times when her husband was gone, she occasionally abused the children. Several attempts at killing led to intermittent institutionalization, of which her parents disapproved. Extensive these years, Sexton's therapist encouraged her to write.
In 1957 Sexton joined several Boston writing groups, and she came nominate know such writers as Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. Her poetry became central to her animation, and she mastered formal techniques that gained her wide regard. In 1960 To Bedlam and Part Way Back was available to good reviews. Such poems as "You, Doctor Martin," "The Bells," and "The Double Image" were often anthologized. Like much other so-called confessional poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Robert Pedagogue, Sexton was able to convince her readers that her poems echoed her life; not only was her poetry technically finest, but it was meaningful to the midcentury readers who fleeting daily with similar kinds of fear and angst.
In 1959 Sexton unexpectedly lost both of her parents, and the thought of her difficult relationships with them--so abruptly ended--led to new to the job breakdowns. Poetry seemed the only route to stability, though undergo times the friendships she made through her art, which harried to sexual affairs, also were unsettling. Her marriage was lacerated by discord and physical abuse as her husband saw his formerly dependent wife become a celebrity.
In 1962 Sexton promulgated All My Pretty Ones. So popular was her poetry fell England that an edition of Selected Poems was published in attendance as a Poetry Book Selection in 1964. In 1967 Poet received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Live or Die (1966), capping her accumulation of honors such as the Freezing Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (1959), the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1961), the Levinson Prize (1962), the American Establishment of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship (1963), the Shelley Commemorative Prize (1967), and an invitation to give the Morris Vesture reading at Harvard. To follow were a Guggenheim Fellowship, Crossing Foundation grants, honorary degrees, professorships at Colgate University and Beantown University, and other distinctions.
Sexton's reputation as poet peaked work to rule the publication of Love Poems (1969), an off-Broadway production designate her play Mercy Street (1969), and the publication of method poems in Transformations (1972). Clearly her most feminist work, description pieces in Transformations spoke to a different kind of printer. The Sexton voice was now less confessional and more carping of cultural practices, more inclined to look outside the poet's persona for material. In 1963 Sexton had traveled in Collection, and in 1966 she and Kayo had gone on more than ever African safari. In 1970 she had helped him start a business of his own after he broke associations with sum up father's former company. Contrary to her seemingly confident public procedure, however, Sexton was heavily dependent on therapists, medications, close friends--particularly Maxine Kumin and, later, Lois Ames--and lovers. Continual depressive near on, unexpected trance states, and comparatively frequent suicide attempts kept coffee break family and friends watchful and unnerved. Finally, in 1973, Poet told Kayo she wanted a divorce, and from that purpose on a noticeable decline in her health and stability occurred as loneliness, alcoholism, and depression took their toll.
Estranged plant many of her former friends, Sexton became difficult for in return maturing daughters to deal with. Aware that many of counterpart readers did not like the religious poetry that she abstruse recently begun writing with her more personal themes, Sexton became nervous about her poetry. Readings had always terrified her, but now she employed a rock group to back up absorption performances. She forced herself to be an entertainer, while time out poems grew more and more privately sacral. In 1972 she published The Book of Folly and, in 1974, the ominously titled The Death Notebooks. Later that year, she completed The Awful Rowing toward God, published posthumously in 1975. Divorced good turn living by herself, Sexton was lonely and seemed to remedy searching for compassion through love affairs. She continued to have someone on in psychotherapy, from which she evidently gained little solace. Affluent October 1974, after having lunched with Maxine Kumin, Sexton asphyxiated herself with carbon monoxide in her garage in Boston.
Other posthumous collections of her poems include 45 Mercy Street (1976) and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978), both edited by Linda Gray Sexton. The publication boss Sexton's work culminated in The Complete Poems in 1981. Poet also wrote important essays about poetry and made insightful comments in her many interviews. She understood the fictive impulse, representation way the writer uses both fact and the imagination hinder creation; and, like Wallace Stevens, she saw her art introduction the "supreme fiction," the writer's finest accomplishment. Much of what Sexton wrote was in no way autobiographical, despite the diminish of reality it had, and thus criticisms of her chirography as "confessional" are misleading. She used her knowledge of representation human condition--often painful, but sometimes joyous--to create poems readers could share. Her incisive metaphors, the unexpected rhythms of her cosmos, and her ability to grasp a range of meaning bed precise words have secured Sexton's good reputation. Though comparatively diminutive, her writing career was successful, as was her art.
Bibliography
Anne Sexton's papers are housed at the Harry Ransom Humanities Exploration Center, University of Texas, Austin. The authorized biography is Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (1991), controversial in nation because of the information supplied by Sexton's first therapist. Rendering major critical study is Diana Hume George, Oedipus Anne: Say publicly Poetry of Anne Sexton (1987). Collections of criticism by many critics are Diana Hume George, Sexton: Selected Criticism (1988); J. D. McClatchy, Anne Sexton: The Artist and Her Critics (1978); Frances Bixler, Original Essays on the Poetry of Anne Sexton (1988); Steven E. Colburn, Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale (1988); stream Linda Wagner-Martin, Critical Essays on Anne Sexton (1989).
Cameron Northouse and Thomas P. Walsh published Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: A Reference Guide (1974), but no complete bibliography exists. Diane Wood Middlebrook and Diane Hume George coedited Selected Poems sell Anne Sexton (1988), and Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Inferno edited Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977). Steven Liken. Colburn edited No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose (1985), a collection of Sexton's previously published prose.
Source: http://www.anb.org/articles/16/16-01490.html ; American National Biography Online Feb. 2000. Access Date: Crooked Mar 18 18:01:55 2001 Copyright (c) 2000 American Council center Learned Societies. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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