SOURCE: "Housewife into Poet: The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton," in New England Quarterly, Vol. 56, No. 4, December, 1983, pp. 483-503.

In April 1960, Anne Sexton for the first time wrote "poet" rather than "housewife" in the "occupation" block of her income tax return. Married since 1948, mother of two daughters, Sexton had been publishing poetry for three years. The change in her status as citizen was significant for Sexton and for American literature. No poet before her had written so frankly of the female realm of family life, nor of its pathologies. And few poets, women or men, achieved success so expeditiously: nine years from drafting her first poem to being awarded the Pulitzer Prize.

Sexton's unprecedented metamorphosis from suburban housewife into major poet appears, at first glance, a fairy tale. The real interest of its improbability, though, lies in Sexton's exemplary struggle against two seemingly unrelated handicaps: that of being a suburban wife and mother without a college education and that of being, at recurring intervals, certifiably mad. At age twenty-eight, Anne Sexton quite unexpectedly began turning herself into an artist. During the years of her apprenticeship, in which she produced two highly regarded books, Sexton's good fortune included working with several established younger poets—W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, James Wright—who immediately recognized her originality and with the Boston poet-teacher John Holmes, who censured it. Friend and adversary, Holmes measured Sexton's work by the literary standards and conventions of an older generation. The chronicle of their relationship provides numerous insights into the development of Sexton's self-awareness as an artist.

I. 1956–57: Discovering "Language"

Sexton began writing poetry at home. Following her hospitalization for suicidal depressiveness in 1956, Sexton's two young children had been removed to the care of grandmothers; Sexton found herself with no occupation but psychotherapy and convalescence. Her doctor suggested that she use her free time to improve her education. "One night I saw I. A. Richards on educational television reading a sonnet and explaining its form," she told an interviewer. "I thought to myself, 'I could do that, maybe; I could try.' So I sat down and wrote a sonnet. The next day I wrote another one, and so forth." She measured progress by changes in the furniture supporting her work. At first she used a card table "because I didn't think I was a poet. When I put in a desk, it was in our dining room. […] Then I put up some book shelves—everything was tentative."

This "tentative" rearrangement of the household was symbolic of Sexton's changed relation to domestic life in 1957. Postpartum depression following the birth of Sexton's first daughter, Linda, led in 1954 to her first psychiatric hospitalization. On her own birthday in 1956 she had made the first of many suicide attempts. And though family members were initially reluctant to acknowledge how serious Sexton's psychological problems had become, they were generous with support once she entered regular treatment. Husband Kayo's father, George Sexton, paid for Sexton's psychotherapy; after Sexton's second major breakdown, in 1955, Kayo's mother took infant Joy into her home for three years, while Anne's sister Blanche periodically cared for Linda. Anne's mother, Mary Gray, paid for regular housekeeping, and Kayo took over the shopping and cooking when Anne could not manage.

Working alone at home, free from other responsibilities. Sexton found writing an effective therapy. "My doctor encouraged me to write more. 'Don't kill yourself,' he said. 'Your poems might mean something to someone else someday.' That gave me a feeling of purpose, a little cause, something to do with my life." "I was quite naive. I thought he knew everything. Of course, he wouldn't know a good poem from a bad poem, but luckily I didn't think of that."

Sexton marked her development as a poet, rather than convalescing mental patient, from the evening she enrolled in a poetry workshop offered by the Boston Center for Adult Education. The teacher was John Holmes, a member of the senior faculty at Tufts University, who supplemented his income by offering instruction in writing to the "nontraditional" types who enroll in adult education courses. Holmes was warm and unintimidating as a teacher. What Sexton derived from the class, however, was not simply how to tell a good poem from a bad poem. Attempting to characterize this period of her life for an interviewer, Sexton drew an analogy between Holmes's poetry class and the mental hospital.

I started in the middle of the term, very shy, writing very bad poems, solemnly handing them in for the eighteen others in the class to hear. The most important aspect of that class was that I felt I belonged somewhere. When I first got sick and became a displaced person, I thought I was quite alone, but when I went into the mental hospital, I found I wasn't, that there were other people like me. It made me feel better—more real, sane. I felt, "These are my people." Well, at the John Holmes class that I attended for two years, I found I belonged to the poets, that I was real there, and I had another, "These are my people."

Working out the implications of this association between the hospital and class provides a way of understanding some of the social significance of Sexton's art.

Until diagnosed as mentally ill, Sexton had been regarded by her exasperated family as childish, selfish, incompetent. Her mother-in-law remembered the shock with which she first watched Sexton throw herself, pounding and screaming, on the floor because she was enraged at being asked to do an errand. Later, Sexton's anger sometimes threatened the safety of her young children; Linda Sexton indicates that the poem "Red Roses" (in the posthumously published 45 Mercy Street) recreates such an incident. But in the hospital, removed from the dynamics of family life, Sexton assumed another identity. As a madwoman she was a member of a distinct social class. Even the forms of her suffering, symptomatic of the disease she embodied, were not unique but generic. Most important for her later development, in the hospital she was given a hearing by therapists trained to decode her symptoms and clarify their function in her life. And she found herself in a social group that used language in a special way, to communicate indirectly.

Years after this first hospitalization, Sexton described the discovery—"I thought I was quite alone, but […] I found I wasn't—to a psychiatrist friend:

It is hard to define. When I was first sick I was thrilled […] to get into the Nut House. At first, of course, I was just scared and crying and very quiet (who me!) but then I found this girl (very crazy of course) (like me I guess) who talked language. What a relief! I mean, well … someone! And then later, a while later, and quite a while. I found out that [Dr.] Martin talked language.[…] By the way, [husband] Kayo has never once understood one word of language.

By "language," Sexton seems to mean forms of speech in which meaning is condensed and indirect and where breaks and gaps demand as much interpretation as what is voiced. Schizophrenics use language this way, and so do poets: "figurative language" is the term Sexton might have used here, except she meant to indicate that the crucible of formation was urgent need. Being permitted to communicate in "language" made her feel "real"—unlike the speech transactions of family life, which made her feel doll-like:

     Someone pretends with me—
     I am walled in solid by their noise—
     or puts me upon their straight bed.
     They think I am me!
     Their warmth is not a friend!
     They pry my mouth for their cups of gin
     and their stale bread.

Psychotherapy following hospitalization, further developing the sense of liberation achieved in the hospital, provided Sexton with a form of education. Intensive scrutiny of her illness introduced her, haphazardly but usefully, to the theory of psychoanalysis, techniques of association, and an arena in which to display her verbal cunning. Equally important, it freed her from confinement in the family. Demonstrably unfit for the occupation of housewife and mother, Sexton turned to other work. And because she had the good fortune to live in Greater Boston, she found her way, merely by enrolling, into another social group that spoke "language": "I found I belonged to the poets, that I was real there."

Boston in the late 1950s was full of poets. "Being a 'poet' in Boston is not so difficult," Anne Sexton wrote Carolyn Kizer in February 1959, "except there are hoards of us living here. The place is jammed with good writers." Such abundance offered numerous advantages to the apprentice. Many well-known writers taught workshops that carried no academic prerequisites. In few places outside Boston might a professor of poetry like I. A. Richards have found an audience for lectures on the sonnet, or a TV station to air them. Both the teacher and Sexton's fellow students at the Boston Center for Adult Education reflected the exceptional literacy of Greater Boston. In John Holmes's class Sexton met Maxine Kumin, a Radcliffe graduate who had decided after some years of motherhood to return to serious writing. Kumin's career was to flourish in tandem with Sexton's, each eventually receiving the Pulitzer Prize in poetry.

It was part of Sexton's transformative good luck, I think, that she found both the instruction and, later, the academic credentials she needed without passing through the advantaged but in important ways—for poets—repressive educational systems that shaped the early work of her Boston cohorts, Adrienne Rich and Sylvia Plath. Rigorous academic training of the period led young poets to imitate the masters of the British tradition, particularly the metaphysical poets and the intensely intellectual modernists. The early writings of both Plath and Rich indicate that they were excellent students, striving for correctness in these modes. As strong poets, and like men who became strong poets under the same academic influences, Plath and Rich survived this academic phase by growing out of it; in their characteristic mature work, the mannerisms of their early models have disappeared. In the realm of the university, however, not only were their literary models intellectual men, but their teachers and lovers were too, and the best women students tended to marry them and then vanish into the underclass of academic life.

Sexton avoided this common predicament of her contemporaries, paradoxically, by marrying young. Having no further academic ambitions after finishing high school, she went on to the Garland School in Boston, where girls were taught home management. She eloped within a few months. Her struggles to mature during the early years of marriage and motherhood took place almost completely within an extended family; her husband was frequently absent on business, and both parents and in-laws were important, frequently intrusive, presences. The illnesses from which she suffered throughout her adult life burgeoned in this context of censorious parental scrutiny. Problematic as her family relations were, however, they formed a different universe of concern from the one she entered as an apprentice to poetry and did not impede her development once she found her way out of the house. She turned from sufferer into poet, a social role different altogether.

II. 1958–59: Becoming Visible

Transforming the insights won in therapy into the poetry she wrote between 1958 and 1960, Sexton was like the miller's daughter, in her own poem "Rumpelstiltskin," who acquires the gift of spinning straw into gold. Developing this gift took about three years. From the time she enrolled in John Holmes's course at the Adult Education Center, Sexton worked hard at learning the craft. The day following the first class meeting, Maxine Kumin ran into Sexton at the Newton public library, where Sexton was trying to locate the contemporary poetry shelves. Here began a collaboration that was to last until Sexton's suicide. Kumin knew her way around a library but, like Sexton, initially felt intimidated by the literary world. Two housewives, they pooled cars and other resources, converted house and garden into workspace, and conducted an ongoing informal seminar in the craft of poetry over the telephone.

Sexton and Kumin were apprentices together, but Kumin possessed credentials Sexton had to acquire another way. Following the Boston Center course, Sexton spent several weeks during the summer of 1958 at the Antioch College Writer's Conference. Attracted by the poem "Heart's Needle," she went expressly to work with W. D. Snodgrass. This peculiarly American institution—the writer's workshop, the writer's conference—suited Sexton because it assumed no common denominator but a gift (or the delusion of a gift) and provided the valuable attention of professionals. Working with Snodgrass at Antioch was decisive. Sexton was already quite a capable writer; under Snodgrass she began to abandon certain of the conventions she had picked up in the poetry workshop—such as attaching the poem to an elevating literary allusion or founding the poem on an abstraction. "Heart's Needle," a poem about Snodgrass's separation from his daughter through divorce, came at a moment when American poetry had grown dull and academic. The poem had a large impact on Robert Lowell, for one, who said "Heart's Needle" had encouraged the production of his Life Studies. Snodgrass's influence on Sexton is visible in two of the finest poems of To Bedlam, "Unknown Girl in a Maternity Ward" and "The Double Image"—poems that raise troubled questions about the relation of mother to child. Whereas Lowell had taken from Snodgrass courage to write about the general anguish of family life, Sexton grasped in his model license to explore her sickness as it pertained to her roles as daughter and mother. Working with Snodgrass, Sexton acquired the distinctive voice of her early poetry.

Back in the Boston suburbs with a cache of new manuscripts and encouragement from Snodgrass, Sexton was accepted by Robert Lowell in September 1958 to audit his graduate writing seminar at Boston University. George Starbuck and Sylvia Plath joined this class in the winter. The three—Sexton, Starbuck, Plath—formed an intense triangle whose emotional dynamics are encoded in Sylvia Plath's journal from the period and in Sexton's hilarious and tender memorial essay to Plath, "The Barfly Ought to Sing."

Within a year from her first session in a poetry workshop, then, Sexton had acquired enviable visibility and respect in the poetry world. She did so by working demonically. "She would willingly push a poem through twenty or more drafts." Maxine Kumin remembers. "She had an unparalleled tenacity in those early days." Despite an acute personal shyness, she also became an active self-promoter: cultivating contacts shamelessly; submitting poems anywhere she could expect editorial advice, if not publication; accepting profuse invitations to give public readings. During 1958–59, Sexton lost both her parents, within months of each other, to severe illnesses, and was hospitalized for psychiatric treatment several times herself. Nonetheless, she continued the discipline of long days at the typewriter and regular meetings with groups of poets in which she tested her developing skills.

At least as important as the Lowell class was Sexton's participation in the meetings John Holmes convened in the fall of 1958 to continue working with his star poets from the Boston Center, Sexton, Kumin, and Sam Albert. George Starbuck also joined the group. After Starbuck's departure for Italy in September 1961, the workshop had a shifting population of visitors, but until then it was a remarkably stable collective. Altogether, what came to be known as "the John Holmes workshop" met for three and one-half years, twice monthly until Holmes died of cancer in 1962. During this time Sexton, Kumin, and Starbuck produced widely noticed first books, and Holmes brought out The Fortune Teller, nominated for a National Book Award in 1962. Most of the poems in these four books had been "workshopped" into shape during long evening sessions at one or another of the participants' homes.

The structure of the workshop was informal: each poet in turn became first among equals as a poem was dissected and interrogated. Holmes, however, assigned himself the presiding role. He was senior in age; he also held a respectable position in the literary establishment peculiar to Boston. President of the New England Poetry Club, for a time poetry critic at the Boston Evening Transcript, anthologist and teacher of poetry. Holmes eventually received appointment to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; but his writing had an old-fashioned quality, an Arnoldian judiciousness that made him an odd contemporary for the younger writers.

With Maxine Kumin and George Starbuck, Holmes was confiding and affectionate; he squired them around to meet other literary people and proposed them for teaching positions. Sexton, however, set his teeth on edge. In life as in art, Sexton possessed a commanding physical presence. Photographs from one of the workshop evenings show her sitting on the floor, a glamour girl with long legs extended, her bright red lipstick and sweater in startling contrast to the subdued coloration of her companions. When the workshop met in the Holmes's living room, Holmes's widow Doris Eyges remembers, Sexton's raucous cries penetrated to the upstairs study: "YOU'VE GOT TO HEAR THIS! IT WORKS! IT WORKS!—FANTASTIC!" The loud voice demanded and got a large share of the group's attention. Too much, Holmes grumbled to Maxine Kumin: Anne "is on my mind unpleasantly too much of the time between our workshops.[…] I'm impatient with her endless demands."

III. 1959–61: Sexton and the Censor

During her years of apprenticeship, Sexton was to have two deeply significant confrontations with John Holmes, whose role in her life was, I believe, to disclose to her, in opposing him, her definitive strengths as a poet. The first conflict occurred in February 1959. Writing several poems a week and opening them for discussion both in the workshop and in Lowell's class, Sexton had amassed enough material to consider compiling a book. When she submitted a preliminary version for Holmes's criticism, his response revealed that his differences with her went far deeper than the mild offense his personal standoffishness had communicated.

Like a good teacher, Holmes began his critique on a positive note: "It's a book, all right, well put together." Next he suggested a change in the proposed title, for marketing reasons: "I really think booksellers and publishers would be wary." Then he went on to give the full substance of his advice, a view he had been holding silently since their earliest days of working together.

I distrust the very source and subject of a great many of your poems, namely, all those that describe and dwell on your time in the hospital. […] I am uneasy […] that what looks like a brilliant beginning might turn out to be so self-centered and so narrowed a diary that it would be clinical only.

Something about asserting the hospital and psychiatric experience seems to me very selfish—all a forcing others to listen to you, and nothing given the listeners, nothing that teaches them or helps them. […] It bothers me that you use poetry this way. It's all a release for you, but what is it for anyone else except a spectacle of someone experiencing release? […]

Don't publish it in a book. You'll certainly outgrow it. and become another person, then this record will haunt and hurt you. It will even haunt and hurt your children, years from now. [8 February 1959]

Sexton's first response was a rattled letter she drafted but did not send. ("Of course I love you. […] From true poets I want truth. Anything else would prove us unreal, after all. Thank you, John, for being real.") The reply she did send encloses a poem, "the condensation of it all," titled "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further." Sexton had concluded that Holmes's motive in advising her about the manuscript was not to critique but to censor her. Useful criticism empowers creative revision, and Sexton knew how to profit from the attention of another poet. But Holmes was not saying "Revise"; he was saying "Don't publish it." Sexton's reply is a defense not only of her manuscript but of a whole genre of poetry that would come to be called "confessional."

     I tapped my own head;
     it was glass, an inverted bowl.
     [...........]
     And if you turn away
     because there is no lesson here
     I will hold my awkward bowl
     with all its cracked stars shining
     [............]
     This is something I would never find
     in a lovelier place, my dear,
     although your fear is anyone's fear
     like an invisible veil between us all …
     and sometimes in private,
     my kitchen, your kitchen,
     my face, your face.

Shrewd as neurotic people often are about the concealed anxieties of others, Sexton insists to Holmes that his rejection of her poetry is in part a defense against the power of her art, which tells not a private but a collective truth and, to his horror, includes and reveals him. Sexton may or may not have heard in literary circles gossip about the gruesome suicide of Holmes's first wife or about Holmes's successful recovery from alcoholism. His life had been "ragged with horrors," as his widow put it but by the late 1950s was outwardly peaceful and secure. His advice to Sexton was possibly advice he had followed himself: "Don't publish it … you will certainly outgrow it and become another person." But Sexton based her work on a different understanding of suffering. In her imagery, "tapping" the head produces "stars," signs radiant with significance, uniting sufferer and beholder despite the "glass bowl" that shuts them off from other forms of contact. "Anyone's fear" of the sick inhibits this identification; the courage of acknowledgment in the poetry of To Bedlam comes from Sexton's lucidity about how general is the suffering that must be experienced as personal but can be grasped and expressed in metaphor.

Far from discouraging publication of the Bedlam poems, Holmes's reaction gave Sexton insight into what the book was really about. The poem she wrote in reply contains an allusion in its title to a letter from Schopenhauer to Goethe: "most of us carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God's sake not to inquire further." The longer quotation of this letter became the epigraph of To Bedlam and Part Way Back, and "For John …" became the introductory poem to Part II, in which Sexton collected her most ambitious and self-revealing poems. Holmes had been "real"—truth-telling—in his response to her, and thus she dared be the same; moreover, his reaction provided a foil Sexton, anticipating the distaste these poems were bound to arouse, could use in her book.

Houghton Mifflin accepted the manuscript in May 1959, just as Lowell's class was ending; it appeared in March 1960 with a jacket blurb by Lowell, which insured that the book would be widely reviewed. The reviews did not change John Holmes's opinion of the work. As Sexton workshopped poems that would shortly appear in her second collection (All My Pretty Ones, October 1962), Holmes's hostility deepened. "I suppose I don't want her to know how I feel," he wrote Maxine Kumin. "But I think more often than you'd ever realize that I can't stand another meeting with her there. […] She is utterly selfish" (6 August 1961). The objectionable characteristics of the person were equally objectionable in the poems.

I said way back, that she was going to have a hard time to change subject matter, after the book, and it's true. I think her search for subject matter is desperate, and that we could talk to her about it, get her to try different things […] she writes so absolutely selfishly, of herself, to bare and shock and confess. Her motives are wrong, artistically, and finally the self-preoccupation comes to be simply damn boring. […] [W]asn't it once understood that the whole intent of writing the bedlam poems was to get rid of them, and to cure herself, to grow up, to become through writing poetry a mature and rich person? […] As it is, she merely re-infects herself, and doesn't seem to know any better than to enjoy it. [16 August 1961]

Holmes took a proprietary interest in the workshop. In February 1960 he had circulated a two-page memo listing four ways to improve its efficacy; many times he would follow up a meeting with letters to one or another of the poets that expanded on his first-sight critiques. Thus in the name of straightening out a problem, he engaged Sexton in a second open confrontation in January 1961. Galled by what he referred to as Anne's "greedy and selfish demands" at one of the workshop sessions, Holmes wrote letters to each of the participants venting his spleen. To Anne he was most tactful, but he made his points:

I was sort of upset about the workshop, as a matter of fact. […] [Y]ou gave Sam an awfully rough time, I felt, too much of it, and hard for a man to take, and he took it like a good sport. But it went on and on. Also I thought you took too much time, more than anyone else got, and also, for the first time I've ever minded, I thought you and Max had too much to drink, and that it took the meaning and responsible thinking away from the poems. [25 January 1961]

Holmes wanted the workshop to work; Sexton thought it was working. Certainly it was working for her: she could audition drafts of poems within a circle of intimates she trusted to know what effects she was after. "What kind of workshop is this?" she fumed to Holmes in her reply to his letter. "Are we mere craftsmen or are we artists! […] I resent the idea that an almost good poem isn't worth any amount of time if we can make it better and first the actual writer has got to be able to HEAR." As Sexton realized, however, the conflict was not merely over workshop manners: it involved behavior indistinguishable from poetics. For Sexton, the unbridled excitements of the group process frequently led to inspired revision. "This is a great strength and a great, but mutual, creative act each time it happens," she argued; to repress the process would be to kill the work. Moreover, she knew the issue was not merely a disproportion in amounts of attention meted out in the workshop. She was not privy to Holmes's judgment in his letter to Sam Albert that she was "like a child and three times as selfish" (24 January 1961), but Sexton's reply indicates that she had felt symbolic family roles being acted out in the group.

In the long pull, John, where you might be proud of me, you are ashamed of me. I keep pretending not to notice … But then, you remind me of my father (and I KNOW that's not your fault.) But there is something else here … who do I remind you of?

The group went on meeting, its format unchanged, until Holmes developed cancer a year later. Holmes's disgust with Sexton increased. He seems to have diffused the problem by inviting others to confide their mistrust and dislike of Sexton and to confirm his judgment that she was a bad influence with reference to both art and manners. "I have heard lately two lengthy judgments of her, exactly like my bitterest feelings, and the impression is shared by others that she does you harm," he warned Maxine Kumin on 6 August.

For Sexton, however, the exchange of letters in February had a clarifying significance, elaborated in a dream she reported to her therapist a few days after writing the letter.

AS: This perfect voice was enunciating very carefully as if to tell me exactly how it was—and yet he was kind and patient about it—very irritated but patient all at once—and this was terrible because whatever he was telling me I was seeing the reverse. […] [H]e'd talk reasonably, reasonably, and he wouldn't stop telling me, you know, just nicely […] it would become so frightening that I would pound on the floor […] maybe screaming stop it, stop it, […] that would be the feeling: LISTEN! and then I'd try something else. PLEASE. Like HE COULDN'T HEAR ME.

Dr: There is one thing I have trouble understanding; that is, what you wanted when you had to pound on the floor.

AS: Well, associate. If you're pounding on the floor then you must be down on the floor. You don't stand up. Crouched […] more like a child or an animal or someone very afraid. It's kind of crazy to be on the floor—and yet it's kind of afraid, really. […] He keeps telling me what's so and probably he's right but it isn't so for me so I've got to try again to make the same thing so for both of us so we can make sense to each other, Otherwise, I'm crazy. I'm lost.

Dr: If you can talk to one person, you're not crazy?

AS: Right. […] One sane person, that is.

Like the poem "For John …" with which Sexton had replied to his letter the year before, this dream is also a "condensation of it all." The unnamed masculine speaker, a composite censor, blends several identities—teacher, critic, father, mother, doctor, senior poet: those in charge of telling "exactly how it is" and unable to "HEAR," Present only as "this perfect voice," his identity may include some of the prestigious reviewers of Sexton's first book: possibly James Dickey ("one feels tempted to drop them furtively into the nearest ashcan, rather than be caught with them in the presence of so much naked suffering"); possibly Geoffrey Hartman ("With such a theme, […] did the poet have to exploit the more sensational aspect of her experience?"). "Kind of patient, telling me about it just nicely," he devastates her.

The doctor asks—reasonably, reasonably—what she wants pounding on the floor, a question Sexton answers rather indirectly. Is the only way to stop the senior poet's voice an act of violence performed in fear, "like a child or an animal"? No: Sexton wants in the dream what she wanted from the workshop, what she had described in her letter to Holmes, the "mutual intuitive creative act" by which the individual poets merged their strengths through disciplined listening. "Probably he's right," but this only makes him distant and self-absorbed. Disengaging from the craziness and fear inspired by being ignored ("you remind me of my father"), Sexton acknowledges—almost in spite of herself—the powers she can marshal against the censor: "I've got to try again […] so we can make sense to each other."

The dream images, like the "awkward bowl / with all its cracked stars shining," radiate outward into other significant relationships formed around words. Among those unable to HEAR, by this date, are Sexton's father and mother, both dead in the spring of 1959, the same spring Houghton Mifflin accepted To Bedlam and Part Way Back. They did not live to read Anne Harvey Sexton's words in a book nor to see the world confirm her as a poet. As in her dream, their impenetrability inspired stubborn efforts to "make the same thing so for both of us"; from All My Pretty On's through The Awful Rowing Toward God, Mother and Father remain in Sexton's poems the powerful withholders of confirming attention, now cleverly dead and beyond appeal.

Out in the real world, however, Sexton's bond with Maxine Kumin involved much reciprocal listening. Kumin has described how each had a special phone installed in her study: "we sometimes connected with a phone call and kept that line linked for hours at a stretch […]; we whistled into the receiver for each other when we were ready to resume." The relationship, fruitful for both, helped Sexton engage her critical faculties once she had completed the process she referred to as "milking the unconscious." Describing it to an interviewer, Sexton said "all poets have a little critic in their heads. […] [Y]ou have to turn off the little critic while you are beginning a poem so that it doesn't inhibit you. Then you have to turn it on again when you are revising and refining." Whistling into the receiver for Maxine was a way of calling up the inner critic by paging an external one. Sexton made use of such a model throughout her life: as playwright; as member of the chamber rock group "Her Kind" that performed her poems to music; as a teacher herself; and, of course, in the workshop.

If John Holmes is one of the identities of the censor in Sexton's dream, then her struggle was not with Holmes the man but with Holmes the Man of Letters: paragon of correctness, arbiter of taste, warden of the literary tradition. The rather playful, even daughterly, tone of Sexton's reply to Holmes's attack suggests that she had already detected the sense that might be made of their mutual hostility. Holmes's distaste for Sexton's work was not based on a judgment that she was a second-rate poet. "What you have is a genius," he had written her in the letter rejecting the Bedlam manuscript, "an unaccountable, unconscious, startling gift with words, and emotions, and patterns for them." His quarrel was with her subject, "your time in the hospital and the complications that took you there" (8 February 1959).

What took Sexton to the hospital was a preference for suicide over the role of mother as she had construed it from her own glamorous, intelligent, repressive, and punitive mother—in the world's eyes, a competent, well-bred woman. The disturbing subject of the Bedlam poems is Sexton's experience of the female roles of mother and daughter as in themselves a sickness, and not merely her sickness. Thus in poems like "The Double Image," she writes of her horror at passing on femaleness itself.

     […] this was the cave of the mirror,
     that double woman who stares
     at herself, as if she were petrified
     [............]
     I, who was never quite sure
     about being a girl, needed another
     life, another image to remind me.
     And this was my worst guilt; you could not cure
     nor soothe it. I made you to find me.

Sexton resisted Holmes's judgment that To Bedlam contained "so self-centered and narrow a diary that it would be clinical only," just as she later resisted the label "confessional" for her poetry. Speaking in the name of art ("Her motives are wrong, artistically") and asking another woman writer to agree that Sexton's subject matter was an extension of her intrusive social behavior ("she writes to bare, and shock and confess"). Holmes insisted that the sick woman was discontinuous with the poet. But Sexton knew the poetry was a revelation and a critique, faithful to the female unconscious; it reflected the high cost of socializing women into feminine roles. Hers were truths that had not been put into poetry before, or with quite the same emphases, by a woman writer. "There's something else here … who do I remind you of?" Sexton was asking the question of an entire tradition largely devoid of the voice of female consciousness—though it was a voice the auditor might be expected to recognize, having heard it at home, or in his own bad dreams.

IV. Coda: Assimilating "Female" to "Poet"

All of Sexton's poems about the hospital and the complications that took her there were published and proceeded to make her reputations: first as a "confessional" poet and then as a woman poet—a category that was developing in literature at the time of her death. The large audiences for her work included mental patients, psychotherapists, and great numbers of women, most of whom did not share Holmes's point of view concerning Sexton's subject matter. The exchange of letters in 1961 was, apparently, the last open confrontation between them; however, it remained for Sexton, who outlived John Holmes after all, to write the interpretive coda to their relationship, in an elegy written shortly after Holmes's death in 1962. Titled "Somewhere in Africa," the poem takes up the themes of reasonableness and wildness expressed in her dream and in her letter to Holmes and synthesizes them in a new way.

     Must you leave, John Holmes, with the prayers and psalms
     you never said, said over you? Death with no rage
     to weigh you down? Praised by the mild God, his arm
     over the pulpit, leaving you timid, with no real age.
 
     whitewashed by belief, as dull as the windy preacher!
     Dead of a dark thing, John Holmes, you've been lost
     in the college chapel, mourned as father and teacher,
     mourned with piety and grace under the University Cross.
     Your last book unsung, your last hard words unknown,
     abandoned by science, cancer blossomed in your throat,
     rooted like bougainvillea into your gray backbone,
     ruptured your pores until you wore it like a coat.
 
     The thick petals, the exotic reds, the purples and whites
     covered up your nakedness and bore you up with all
     their blind power. I think of your last June nights
     in Boston, your body swollen but light, your eyes small
 
     as you let the nurses carry you into a strange land.
     … If this is death and God is necessary let him be hidden
     from the missionary, the well-wisher and the glad hand.
     Let God be some tribal female who is known but forbidden.
 
     Let there be this God who is a woman who will place you
     upon her shallow boat, who is a woman naked to the waist,
     moist with palm oil and sweat, a woman of some virtue
     and wild breasts, her limbs excellent, unbruised and chaste.
 
     Let her take you. She will put twelve strong men at the oars
     for you are stronger than mahogany and your bones fill
     the boat high with fruit and bark from the interior.
     She will have you now, whom the funeral cannot kill.
 
     John Holmes, cut from a single tree, lie heavy in her hold
     and go down that river with the ivory, the copra and the gold.

In Sexton's elegy reasonableness and wildness became two gods: one male, identified with institutions; one female, identified with poetry. The formal art of the piece reinforces the ceremonial tone, yet its argument insists that poetry belongs to the territory of wildness: libido, darkness, fertility, beauty, strangeness. The poem seems to tap all Sexton's ambivalent love for Holmes. It praises his integrity ("cut from a single tree") and claims him for the paradise reserved for the tribe of poets, but it also distinguishes the censor from the artist in him. Separating the dead poet from the authority figures in the poem—"mild God," "windy preacher"—Sexton conveys her understanding that the conflict between her and Holmes was not merely a conflict between two temperaments. It was a successful struggle, on her side, against the conventions and "standards" John Holmes affirmed, which Sexton experienced as powers, powers that could repress, even extinguish, the growth of her art. Criticizing her work, Holmes invariably used the words "childish" and "selfish"; he saw the poems only as referring to the person, whom he deplored, not as radiant signs. It was fortunate for Sexton that neither she nor Holmes was willing to abandon the struggle until it had forced her to clarify this difference for herself. Holmes never failed to assert his standards—which were highly acceptable ones in literary Boston and elsewhere—as part of a process of taking her seriously. Under his gentlemanly disapproval she acquired knowledge of herself as a poet of damage and resistance.

By the time she wrote "Somewhere in Africa," Sexton had achieved genuine separation from all her early mentors—Snodgrass, Lowell, James Wright—who were also, of course, censors; she had acquired a public persona and voice that was distinctively female. And if the female subjects of her poems were dismembered, bruised, unchaste, and self-vilifying, the female god of art in her elegy is none of these. In Sexton's apprenticeship, femaleness itself was an aspect of identity that had, with great difficulty, been assimilated to the sense of authority necessary to mastery, "Somewhere in Africa" identifies femaleness as one of the poet's powers; with all the strength of the known but forbidden, the poet carries her censor and teacher to his final resting place in her hold, on her terms.