A college dropout turned housewife, fashion model, and jazz singer, Anne Gray Harvey Sexton is an unusual source of self-revelatory verse that prefaced an era of modernist confessional. An ambivalent feminist, she spoke for the turmoil in women who despised the housewife’s boring fate, yet she suffered guilt over ventures into angry complaint and personal freedom. A relentlessly honest observer capable of springing from disillusion to flashes of perception, she celebrated physical details of womanhood, naming menstruation, masturbation, incest, adultery, illegitimacy, and abortion, and pondered drug dependence, madness, and suicide. Long parted from religion, she retained the fault-consciousness and self-loathing of Roman Catholicism. Her freedom of expression engaged female literary figures at the same time that it distressed poet James Dickey.
Sexton was born on November 9, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts, to a prominent family. She grew up strong-willed, outstandingly attractive, and confident, a surface poise that masked misgiving. She attended Wellesley public schools and Rogers Hall, an exclusive boarding school.
After a year at Garland Junior College, an elite Boston finishing school, Sexton eloped to North Carolina at age 19 with Alfred Mueller “Kayo” Sexton II, whom she had dated for a month. He dropped out of premedical courses at Colgate to work in his father-in-law’s business; Anne clerked in a bookshop. During their tumultuous marriage, the couple lived in Massachusetts, Baltimore, and San Francisco. They produced daughters Linda Gray and Joyce Ladd.
While Kayo fought in the Korean War, Linda’s birth precipitated Sexton’s depression, exacerbated by ambivalence toward motherhood and voices compelling her to die. Unsuited to domesticity and infant care, she required intermittent hospitalization at Westwood Lodge. At her doctor’s direction, she relieved anguish through confessional writing. Her earliest efforts focus on conflict between housekeeping and creative expression.
Writing verse helped stabilize Sexton’s mind after a 1956 suicide attempt and earned her a scholarship to the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study. After forming a professional friendship with Maxine Kumin at a poetry workshop at Boston Center for Adult Education, Sexton developed into a major talent, characterizing psychiatric analysis and grief for her dead parents in verse. Her literary growth was swift and intense. In 1961, she became the first poetry scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study.
Central to Sexton’s themes are the exasperating self-study, frank admissions of personal fault, and death urges that lace the writings of her idols, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, and Sylvia Plath. Sexton’s initial collections—To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) and All My Pretty Ones (1962), nominated for a National Book Award and winner of the Helen Haire Levinson Prize—preceded a fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, nomination for a National Book Award, and multiple invitations for readings. In the wake of a European tour and publication of the children’s books Eggs of Things (1963) and More Eggs of Things (1964), coauthored with Maxine Kumin, and Selected Poems (1964), Sexton achieved a Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die (1966), containing personal and aesthetic ponderings over unresolved grief.
During a three-year reprieve from suicidal fantasies, Sexton pursued mature, darkly humorous verse in Poems by Thomas Kinsella, Douglas Livingstone and Anne Sexton (1968) and Love Songs (1969) and saw the production of a play, Mercy Street (1963). While teaching at Boston University and Colgate, she exposed social fraud by restating Grimm’s fairy tales in Transformations (1971) and issued a third children’s title, Joey and the Birthday Present (1971), also coauthored by Kumin. Newly turned to interest in religion, she wrote The Book of Folly (1972), filled with themes of antiwoman violence, incest, abortion, drug addiction, neurosis, and insanity.
Following an appointment to the Pulitzer Prize jury in 1973, Sexton completed The Death Notebooks (1974), a vivid statement of a death urge. Addicted to alcohol and tranquilizers, she despised her torpid, bloated body. She divorced Kayo with some hesitance, even though he was physically and emotionally abusive to her and their daughters. She entered McLean Hospital for treatment but left the hospital disheveled, ashen, and thin, and survived less than eleven months.
At the time of her suicide by carbon monoxide gas on October 4, 1974, in the garage of her home in Weston, Massachusetts, Sexton, wrapped in her mother’s fur coat and clutching a glass of vodka, ended a troubled, chaotic life. She died just as she was emerging as a champion of self-fulfillment. At a memorial service, Adrienne Rich decried the self-indulgence of suicidal personalities; Denise Levertov noted in an obituary that Sexton had confused creativity with self-annihilation.
Sexton’s personal, many-sided poems and intimate writings appeared in posthumous editions—The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), a juvenile title, The Wizard’s Tears (1975), the play 45 Mercy Street (1976), Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters (1977), and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978). A compendium, Complete Poems, was issued in 1981, and another, No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, in 1985.
