With little formal training in literature, Anne Sexton emerged as a major modern voice, transforming verse begun as therapy into poetic art of the first order. Important for refining the confessional mode, experimenting with new lyrical forms, and presenting themes from the female consciousness, Sexton had the controversial impact of any pioneering artist. Despite periodic hospitalization for depression, ultimately culminating in her suicide at age forty-six, Sexton contributed richly to her craft, receiving much critical recognition and traveling widely.

Awarded fellowships to most of the major writing conferences, Sexton worked closely with John Holmes, W. D. Snodgrass, Robert Lowell, Kumin, and others. She taught creative writing at Harvard, Radcliffe, and Boston University, and she served as editorial consultant to the New York Poetry Quarterly and as a member of the board of directors of Audience magazine. She won the Levinson Prize from Poetry magazine in 1962, and her second collection of poetry, All My Pretty Ones, was nominated for a National Book Award in 1963. In 1967, she received the Shelley Memorial Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her fourth collection, Live or Die. Sexton also received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1969 and many honorary degrees from major universities.

Although most critics believe the quality of her work deteriorated toward the end of her life, by that time, she had achieved success with a new, highly personal voice in poetry and expanded the range of acceptable subjects to include the intimate concerns of women. In presenting the theme of female identity, Sexton began with a careful lyric formalism and then progressed throughout her career to experiment with open, dramatic forms, moving from the confessional to the surreal. She explored the limits of sanity and the nature of womanhood more fully than any poet of her generation.

In addition to several articles on the craft and teaching of poetry, Anne Sexton wrote a play that ran successfully at the American Place Theatre of New York and several children’s books produced in collaboration with Maxine Kumin. The play, 45 Mercy Street (pr. 1969), presents the struggle of a woman named Daisy to find meaning in a past and present dominated by religious and sexual conflicts objectified as demons and disembodied voices. Its success suggests that the poet also had talent as a playwright, and critics find the thematic material important biographically and artistically in an analysis of Sexton’s career. An important collection of her prose is Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters (1977); also, a recording of twenty-four poems read by the poet is available as Anne Sexton Reads Her Poetry, recorded June 1, 1974.

Contrast Anne Sexton’s attitude toward her father in “All My Pretty Ones” with Sylvia Plath’s in “Daddy.”

How is it possible that reading about painful struggles like Sexton’s can give pleasure?

How does one explain Sexton’s rejection of confession as a religious exercise while practicing it as a poetic one?

What do Sexton’s epigraphs contribute to the poems that they introduce?

Does Sexton avoid morbidity in her poems about death?

What changes in poetic form marked Sexton’s poetry as her writing career proceeded?