Anne Sexton

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to: navigation, search
For the singer, see Ann Sexton.
Anne Sexton

Polaroid portrait taken in 1974, the year of her death.
Born November 9, 1928(1928-11-09)
Newton, Massachusetts, United States
Died October 4, 1974 (aged 45)
Weston, Massachusetts, United States
Occupation Poet
Nationality American
Genres Confessionalism
Children Linda Gray Sexton, Joyce Sexton

Anne Sexton (born Anne Gray Harvey) (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts—October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts) was an American poet and writer.

Contents

[edit] Life

[edit] Early life

Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life near Boston, Massachusetts. She was born to Ralph Gray Harvey and Mary Gray Staples. In 1945, she began attending a boarding school, Rogers Hall, in Lowell, Massachusetts. For a time as a young woman, she modeled for Boston's Hart Agency. On August 16, 1948, she eloped with Alfred "Kayo" Sexton.[1] They remained married until 1973.[2]

[edit] Illness and subsequent career

Sexton suffered from complex mental illness. Her first manic episode took place in 1954. After a second breakdown in 1955, she met Dr. Martin Orne, who was to become her longtime therapist, at Glenside Hospital. Sexton believed she was not valuable except in her ability to please men and told Orne in her first interview that her only talent might be for prostitution. He later told her that his evaluation showed that she had a creative side and encouraged her to take up poetry.[3].

Though she was very nervous about it and needed a friend to make the phone call and accompany her to the first workshop, she enrolled in her first poetry workshop with John Holmes as instructor.

After the workshop, Sexton experienced remarkably quick success with her poetry, with her poems accepted by The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the Saturday Review. Sexton also studied with Robert Lowell[4] at Boston University alongside distinguished poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck.[5]

Sexton's poetic life was further encouraged by her mentor, W.D. Snodgrass, whom she met at the Antioch Writer's Conference in 1957. His poem, "Heart's Needle", about his separation from his three year old daughter, encouraged her to write "The Double Image," a poem significant in expressing the multi-generational relationships existing between mother and daughter. "Heart's Needle" was particularly inspirational to Sexton because at the time she first read it her own young daughter was living with her mother-in-law. Sexton began writing letters to Snodgrass and they soon became friends. While working with Holmes, Sexton encountered Maxine Kumin, with whom she became good friends throughout the rest of her 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. She still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry. She also collaborated with musicians, forming a jazz-rock group called "Her Kind" that added music to her poetry. She also wrote "Mercy Street", a play produced off-Broadway after several years of revisions in 1969.

[edit] Death

Grave of Anne Sexton

On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to review Sexton's most recent book, The Awful Rowing Toward God. Upon returning home, she put on her mother's old fur coat, locked herself in her garage, started the engine of her car and committed 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.

[edit] Content and themes of work

Sexton is seen as the modern model of the confessional poet. She was inspired by the publication of Snodgrass' Heart's Needle, and her work encompasses issues specific to women such as menstruation, abortion, and more broadly masturbation and adultery, before such subjects were commonly addressed in poetic discourse.

Sexton's work has been criticized as being non-intellectual and non-rigorous by her writing peers. [6] For some people, her work began to deteriorate as her career progressed from her early successes. Her work towards the end of the sixties has been criticized as "preening, lazy and flip" by otherwise respectful critics.[7] Some people see her dependence on alcohol as compromising her last work. However other critics see Sexton's later work favorably in terms of comparing it with her early formal work. "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 [...]."[8]

The title for her eighth collection of poetry and one of her last writings, The Awful Rowing Toward God, came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although unwilling to administer the last rites, did tell her: "God is in your typewriter," which gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing. Her last writings expressed her strange hunger for death: The Death Notebooks and The Awful Rowing Toward God.[9]

Her work started out as being about herself[nb 1] As her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside of her own life[nb 2] Poet and critic Alicia Ostriker says, "[S]he was the least reticent personally [out of the confessional poets] to have her poems 'mean something to someone else.'" Later she reached out of her own life story for themes in her poems. Transformations is one such book that attempts to use Grimm's fairy tales as the source for her poetry. Later she used Christopher Smart's Jubilate Agno [10]and the Bible as the basis for some of her work.

Sexton's work is extremely difficult to separate from her life. When Sexton died in 1974, many people saw suicide and despair as the inevitable outcome of being a writer. At the time of Sexton's death, in the context of Sexton, Sylvia Plath who took her life in 1963, and to a certain extent John Berryman and Robert Lowell, poets Adrienne Rich and Denise Levertov protested in separate obituaries the confusion between creativity and death that Sexton's own demise represented. Denise Levertov says, "we who are alive must make clear, as she could not, the distinction between creativity and self-destruction." [11] Adrienne Rich wrote about how women's anger is considered socially acceptable as long as it is turned inward, as Sexton's addictions to pills, alcohol and finally dying by her own hand, illustrate.

But it also is praised as being honest, with many people admiring the self taught aspects of her life. By the end of her life the woman who had never graduated college had accumulated a Pulitzer Prize[12], several fellowships and several honorary doctorates. She worked and succeeded in a male dominated field that valued tradition and traditional educations in English literature. In the celebrity obsessed world of the 1960s that continues today, Sexton's life reverberates with meaning about the implications of celebrity and its effects on the artist's life.

[edit] Subsequent Controversy

Dr. Orne diagnosed her with bipolar disorder,[citation needed] but his competence to do so is called into question by his early use of unsound psychotherapeutic techniques. During sessions with Sexton he used hypnosis and sodium pentothal to recover supposedly repressed memories, while actually using suggestion to implant false memories of childhood sexual abuse, stated to be untrue from interviews with her mother and other relatives.[13] However this is contradicted by Martin Orne's obituary in The New York Times. The article states that as early as a Harvard undergraduate, Dr. Orne wrote that hypnosis in an adult frequently does not present accurate memories of childhood, instead "adults under hypnosis are not literally reliving their early childhoods but presenting them through the prisms of adulthood".[14] According to Dr. Orne, Anne Sexton was extremely suggestible and would mimic the symptoms of the patients around her in the mental hospitals she was committed. Dr. Orne eventually concluded that Anne Sexton was suffering from hysteria.[15]

The Middlebrook biography also states that Anne Sexton had another personality emerge, named "Elizabeth", while under hypnosis. Dr. Orne refused to encourage this development. Subsequently this "alternate personality" disappeared. Anne Sexton's life is rich in implications in the study of the construction of mental illness and what it implies and directly says for women and for humanity.

When Diane Middlebrook published her biography of Anne Sexton with the approval of Sexton's daughter and literary executor, Linda, it attracted extreme amounts of controversy.[16] Dr. Orne gave Diane Wood Middlebrook the bulk of the tapes made in the therapy sessions between Orne and Sexton for her to use in Middlebrook's biography of Anne Sexton. These tapes were released to Middlebrook, her biographer, after she had written a substantial amount of the first draft of Sexton's biography. The addition of the tapes forced her to start the biography over.

Controversy from the posthumous public release of tapes recorded during Sexton's psychotherapy (and thus subject to doctor-patient confidentiality), revealed Sexton's inappropriate behavior with her daughter Linda, her physically violent behavior towards her daughters and her physical altercations with her husband. [17] While writing the biography Linda Gray Sexton confirmed to the book's author, Diane Wood Middlebrook, that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother.

However, for many people the real scandal was not the release of the therapy tapes but the fact that Sexton had an affair with the therapist that replaced Dr. Orne in the sixties[18]. No action was taken to censure or discipline the second therapist. "What if one of the many doctors -- Dr. Orne included -- who knew about the relationship had blown the whistle on [the second doctor] instead of putting his career ahead of Sexton's sanity." [19] Dr. Orne considered the affair with the second therapist (given the pseudonym "Ollie Zweizung" by Diane Wood Middlebrook[20] and Linda Sexton), to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her suicide.

These occurrences attracted considerable attention. Sexton's family expressed strong opinions, both for and against the biography in several editorials and op-ed pieces, mainly in The New York Times and The New York Times Book Review.

[edit] Awards

  • Audience magazine's annual poetry prize (1959)
  • Poetry magazine's Levinson Prize (1962)
  • National Book Award nomination for All My Pretty Ones (1963)
  • American Academy of Arts and Letters' traveling fellowship (1963)
  • Ford Foundation grant (1963)
  • Shelley Memorial Prize for Live or Die (1967)
  • Pulitzer Prize in poetry for Live or Die (1967)
  • Guggenheim Foundation grant (1969)
  • Tufts University's Doctor of Letters (1970)
  • Crashaw Chair in Literature from Colgate University (1972)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ "Self was the center, self was the perimeter, of her vision." Ostriker, 64
  2. ^ Ostriker, 64

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Poetry and Prose

  • Uncompleted Novel-started in the 1960s
  • To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960)
  • All My Pretty Ones (1962)
  • Live or Die (1966) - Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1967
  • Love Poems (1969)
  • Mercy Street, a 2-act play performed at the American Place Theatre (1969)
  • Transformations (1971) ISBN 0-618-08343-X
  • The Book of Folly (1972)
  • The Death Notebooks (1974)
  • The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975; posthumous)
  • 45 Mercy Street (1976; posthumous)
  • Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters, edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames (1977; posthumous)
  • Words for Dr. Y. (1978; posthumous)
  • No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose, edited by Steven E. Colburn (1985; posthumous)

[edit] Children's books

all co-written with Maxine Kumin

  • 1963 Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
  • 1964 More Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
  • 1974 Joey and the Birthday Present (illustrated by Evaline Ness)
  • 1975 The Wizard's Tears (illustrated by Evaline Ness)

[edit] References

  1. ^ http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sexton/chrono.htm "Anne Sexton Chronology" retrieved February 20, 2009
  2. ^ http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/poetry/as/bio1.html "Anne Sexton: A Brief Biography retrieved February 20, 2009
  3. ^ Middlebrook, Diane Wood (1992). Anne Sexton: A Biography. Boston: HoughtonMifflin. ISBN 0679741828. http://books.google.com/books?id=Tm2-EAyHLRsC&q=anne+sexton&dq=anne+sexton&ei=4RiMSfDtHqaGzgTZgYG6BQ&pgis=1. 
  4. ^ http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleid=3360 "Anne Sexton: A Biography-review by James Carroll" retrieved January 18, 2009
  5. ^ http://www.uta.edu/english/tim/poetry/as/bio1.html "ABrief Biography of the Life of Anne Sexton" retrieved January 6, 2009
  6. ^ Oates, Joyce Carol. The Journals of Joyce Carol Oates 1973-1982 New York, Harper Collins, 2007: 205
  7. ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFD61639F93BA2575BC0A967958260&sec=&pagewanted=all retrieved January 7, 2009
  8. ^ Rothenberg, Jerome (1995). Poems for the Millenium Volume Two. Los Angeles: University of California Press. p. 330. http://books.google.com/books?id=0e4lAAAACAAJ&dq=Poems+for+the+Millenium. 
  9. ^ Anne Sexton
  10. ^ Sexton, Anne (2000). Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. Boston: Mariner. p. xvii. ISBN 0618057048. http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=682617. 
  11. ^ http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleid=3360 retrieved January 18, 2009
  12. ^ http://www.english.illinois.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sexton/sexton_life.htm retrieved February 2,2009
  13. ^ Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography, 56-60.
  14. ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9A06EEDE1031F934A25751C0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=all retrieved January 6, 2009
  15. ^ Anne Sexton: A Biography, xx
  16. ^ Anne Sexton: A Biography.
  17. ^ Psychiatrist Criticized Over Release Of Poet's Psychotherapy Tapes By Ken Hausman
  18. ^ http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,973887-1,00.html retrieved January 18, 2009
  19. ^ http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D0CEFD61639F93BA2575BC0A967958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=3 retrieved January 9, 2009
  20. ^ http://www.pshares.org/issues/article.cfm?prmarticleid=3360 retrieved January 18, 2009

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

Sister project Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Anne Sexton
Sister project Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Anne Sexton

Spanish translation.Raùl Racedo,Argentina

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anne_Sexton"
Personal tools