Sexton, Anne (Vol. 6) | Sexton, Anne 1928–1974
Sexton, Anne 1928–1974
Ms Sexton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet, was a friend of Sylvia Plath and like her chose to end her own life. Erica Jong, objecting to the "confessional" tag always hung on Ms Sexton's work, says that if anything, Anne Sexton [was] a psychological poet," and her poems were "the reincarnation, the regurgitation, the living she [made] out of the jaws of death." (See also Contemporary Authors, Vols. 1-4, rev. ed.; obituary, Vols. 53-56.)
Anne Sexton's … poems are stark, slow-moving pieces which combine terse statement with forceful metaphor, sacrificing syntactical flow and complexity to the stabbing power of sharply delineated images. What makes [The Book of Folly] distinctive is the tension between that stringent control and a Plath-like sense of sickening vacuity at the core of things. The poems return obsessionally to images of physical disintegration and devouring, casting them in a toneless,...
[The entire page is 4874 words long]
Navigate
