forms when the mother learns of her own incurable illness and has her portrait done “instead.” The portraits, facing each other in the parental home, serve as a mirror reflection with the figure of the speaker’s child moving between them. As the speaker had been “an awkward guest” returning to her mother’s home, so the young daughter arrives “an awkward guest” for the reunion with her recovering mother. The child provides both a measure of final identity and guilt.

In “The Division of Parts,” the bitterness of inheritance replaces grief as a response to the death of the speaker’s mother. As in “The Double Image,” the coincidence of the speaker’s recovery with her mother’s suffering suggests an apparent exchange of death for life. Equipped with the lost one’s “garments” but not with grief, the speaker recalls the suffering of her mother, overshadowed now by the ceremonies of the Lenten season. Division of property replaces the concerns of the Christ who waits on the crucifix for the speaker. Her dreams recall only the division of ways: the separation of death and inevitable division of property.

Other poems in the first volume experiment with the voices of those whose experiences differ from those of the poet. “The Farmer’s Wife,” for example, reveals the isolation and loneliness of a young wife on an Illinois farm. The poem presents the ambivalence of the woman toward her husband, whose work and bed are her lifelong habit. “Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward” attempts to voice the feelings of an unmarried girl who has just given birth. The emotions and imagery are generalized and undefined in presenting the setting of an urban hospital and the typical unmarried girl in trouble. According to Sexton, the poem marks a pivotal moment in her career, for after reading it, Robert Lowell advised her to develop the more personal voice that gives her finest poetry its power. A poem reflecting conflicting advice is “For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further.” John Holmes, Sexton’s teacher for a Boston University poetry workshop, recommended that she avoid the self-revelation becoming characteristic of her work. The directly personal voice won out, not only in this poem of apology to Holmes but also throughout her career. Another early poem, “Kind Sir: These Woods,” indicates an awareness that readers in general may disapprove her probing of the psyche, “this inward look that society scorns.” The speaker finds in her inward search, however, nothing worse than herself, “caught between the grapes and the thorns,” and the search for herself continued to the end of her life.

All My Pretty Ones

An epigraph for Sexton’s second collection, All My Pretty Ones, suggests a reason for the poet’s insistence on inner exploration. According to a letter of Franz Kafka, “a book should serve as the ax for the frozen sea within us.” Sexton similarly asserted in a later interview that “poems of the inner life can reach the inner lives of readers in a way that anti-war poems can never stop a war.” The inner life revealed in All My Pretty Ones is primarily the experience of grief, the response to loss of the most precious others expressed in the lines from Macbeth (pr. 1606) that form the title. “The Truth the Dead Know” and the title poem deal with the death of Sexton’s parents during the same year. The first poem eliminates personal references except for a dedication to the parents and simply contrasts the intensity of life and grief with the emptiness and stoniness of the dead. “All My Pretty Ones” addresses the lost father with memories of his belongings, his habits, and his hopes. Disposition of scrapbook photographs provides a way to accept and forgive the disappointments of the past, including the secret alcoholism his daughter can never forget.

The strongest poems of the second volume arise from Sexton’s own experience. In “The Operation,” the speaker’s confrontation with death parallels the illness of her mother, and the speaker considers the uncertainty of life as much as the reality of death. Knowing that cancer, the disease of her mother, the “historic thief” that plundered her mother’s home is now invading her own domain, the speaker proceeds helplessly through the preparations for surgery, the experience of losing consciousness, and the recovery phase in doubt of her survival. Then, pronounced better, perhaps cured, by the doctors, she is sent home like a child, the stitches in her abdomen reminding her of the lacing on a football ready for the game. A similar sense of vulnerability appears in “The Fortress,” wherein the speaker admits to her sleeping child that a mother has no ability to control life and that eventually it will overtake the child through the suffering of “bombs or glands” ending in death. Beyond the sense of relationships, especially those connected with motherhood, controlling many of Sexton’s poems, there looms a sense of dark knowledge gained through poetry as a secret or forbidden art. In “The Black Art,” for example, the speaker asserts that a woman who writes will not fit into society, for she “feels too much, these trances and portents.” Home, family, social life are inadequate expressions for the one who wishes to know and control the mysterious forces of existence. The poem recalls an earlier statement of identity, “Her Kind,” in which the speaker presents herself as a witch who is lonely, misunderstood, insane, and unashamed to die in the course of her journey. The comparison of Sexton’s poetry with the black arts places her work on the level of myth, particularly in her pursuit of death itself.

Live or Die

Live or Die, Sexton’s third collection, marks a high point in her career for handling intimate or despairing material with sure control and an element of self-irony. The epigraph for this book, taken from Saul Bellow’s Herzog (1964), records the admonition to “Live or die, but don’t poison everything.” Certainly, the poems of this group reflect the impulse toward love and life as well as the impulse toward despair and death. The institutional setting appears in the volume but so does the home and family relationships of Sexton. “Flee on Your Donkey,” one of her best-known poems, develops the tension between the worlds of private and institutional life. In the poem, a flood of scenes from the hospital culminates in a desire to escape back to the normal world that patients enter the hospital to avoid. Similarly, in “For the Year of the Insane,” structured as a prayer to Mary, the speaker struggles to escape her mental as well as physical confinement. No longer at peace in the refuge of therapy, a mind that believes itself “locked in the wrong house” struggles in vain for expression and release. Poems of similar desperation, “The Addict” and “Wanting to Die,” develop other means of escape. The speaker of the former poem yearns for the hallucinatory realm where drugs parcel out moments of deathlike experience. “Wanting to Die,” another of Sexton’s best-known poems, strives to explain for the uninitiated the hunger for death haunting the potential suicide. The obsession with methods of dying replaces the desire for experience of life. Love itself becomes “an infection” to those seeking the secret pleasure that final escape from the body will bring.

Poems of the third collection that deal with survival include those concerned with children and birth. In “Little Girl, My String Bean, My Lovely Woman,” the speaker identifies with the approaching womanhood of her daughter Linda, beautiful even in the uncertain changes adolescence creates. The poem celebrates the body in its growth and capacity for becoming; the figure of mother and daughter share the mystery of reproduction that is spiritual, “a white stone,” as well as physical, “laughter,” and joy. In “Pain for a Daughter,” the mother discovers in her injured child’s suffering a universal misery that transcends their relationship. The child’s foot torn by the hoof of a horse, she cries out to God, not her mother, and the isolation of the cry suggests not childhood misery but the future pangs of childbirth and death itself. The decision to survive, for the moment at least, appears in “Live,” the final statement of the volume. The speaker recounts a shift from life as a dark pretense or game to a moment when the sun rose within her, illuminating the figures of her husband and daughters. The speaker determines herself no longer to be the murderer she thought, allowing the newborn Dalmatian puppies to live and deciding to survive herself.

Love Poems

Love Poems, Sexton’s fourth collection, examines the cycle of roles women play in life and love. Poems of separation and return, for example, include “Touch” and “Eighteen Days Without You,” lyrics in which love between a woman and her lover controls survival and existence beyond their union. Throughout the volume, individual body parts achieve significance beyond their function in the physical realm. “Touch” begins, “For months my hand had been sealed off/ in a tin box.” Following the arrival of her lover, life rushes into the fingers, spreading across the continent in its intensity. Other celebrations of physical contact include “The Kiss,” “The Breast,” and “In Celebration of My Uterus.” In this last poem, Sexton develops a great song that a whole catalog of women sing as they go about their daily work carrying the “sweet weight” of the womb. The negative side of experience returns in poems such as “The Break,” which recounts the depression preceding a fall down the stairs that broke Sexton’s hip and forced another lengthy hospitalization. Although the bones are sure to heal, the speaker’s heart begins another building process to create a “death crèche,” ready for the zeal of destruction when it returns.

Transformations

The theme of self-destruction is hidden in Transformations, Sexton’s collection of rewritten fairy tales narrated by a “middle-aged witch,” the poet’s name for her persona in the tales. For some critics, this collection provides a more objective scheme for Sexton’s mythic quest; for others, the subject matter is quaint and unoriginal. Certainly the retold tales are entertaining and effective in the dark, modern twists Sexton creates. “Snow White,” for example, tortures the wicked queen without mercy before returning to gaze triumphantly in her mirror “as women do.” “Rumpelstiltskin” develops the figure of the dark one within, the doppelgänger trying to escape every man. Failing to gain the queen’s child, he splits in two, “one part papa/ one part Doppelganger,” completing the division of the psyche. “Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)” becomes a tortured insomniac after being awakened by her prince and never knows the sleep of death.

Last years

Sexton’s last collections, The Book of Folly, The Death Notebooks, and The Awful Rowing Toward God contain many of her previous themes developed in experimental forms, including dramatic changes in style. Critics note a looser structure in the poems written late in Sexton’s career; some believe it reflects a deterioration of her creative powers, while others find the experimentalism valuable for its innovation.

One of the well-known late poems, “Hurry Up Please It’s Time,” reflects the variety of thematic material, the variable stanza lengths, and the intrusion of dialogue, such as those between “Anne” and “The Interrogator.” The poem reworks the approach of death and the obsessive derision of life on the part of the dying one. “Ms. Dog,” one of Sexton’s nicknames for herself, as well as “God” spelled backward, figures in the poem as the troubled one facing guilt and rejection as well as the mystery and futility of death. In “Frenzy,” another of the last poems, the speaker describes herself “typing out the God/ my typewriter believes in.”

Through the last years of Sexton’s life, her writing sustained her even as her quest darkened. At the end of her life, she sought God when doctors, friends, and family were unable to help her; and her work reflected an outwardly religious search that had formerly been hidden. Although she never revealed that she found God within or without the lines of her poetry, she left behind a brilliant record of her heroic search.