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Anne Sexton (born Anne Gray Harvey; 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.
Anne Sexton, American poet whose work is noted for its confessional intensity. She won a Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die. Other collections include To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones, Transformations, and The Awful Rowing Toward God. Learn more about Sexton’s life and work.
Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts and raised in Weston, Massachusetts. One of the most popular poets of mid-20th century America, Sexton’s impressive body of work continues to be widely read and debated by literary scholars and cultural critics alike.
In other words, Anne Sexton’s poems are at once confessional and feminist, and her work is worth exploring on its own terms. She has been a considerable influence on later poets, including Adrienne Rich and Sharon Olds. Below, we select and introduce ten of Sexton’s finest poems. 1. ‘You, Doctor Martin’.
May 13, 2022 · Anne Sexton was a 1950’s housewife with no clear direction to her life, struggling with what today is known as bipolar disorder. Unable to care well for her children or herself, she was hospitalized. Afterwards she wrote a couple of poems about her struggles and showed them to her therapist.
Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, on November 9, 1928. She received the 1967 Pulitzer Prize in poetry for her third collection, Live or Die (Houghton Mifflin, 1966). She taught at Boston University and at Colgate University, and died on October 4, 1974, in Weston, Massachusetts.
Sexton is not the loyal but the disloyal daughter, not a tragic heroine persisting in rites of mourning but a flawed human resisting grief. The dead father in Plath’s poem remains passive and mysterious; the dead parents in Sexton’s, as if punishing their daughter, flatly “refuse / to be blessed.”
