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Anne Sexton Biography |
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: For the singer Ann Sexton, see Ann Sexton
Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts – October 4, 1974, Weston, Massachusetts), born Anne Gray Harvey, was an United States poet and author.
Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life near Boston. In 1945, Sexton began attending a boarding school, Rogers Hall, in Lowell, Massachusetts. For a time as a young woman, she modeled at Boston's Hart Agency. She eloped in 1948 with Alfred Muller Sexton, known as "Kayo." Before their divorce in the early 1970s, she had two children with Kayo: Linda Gray Sexton, later a novelist and memoirist, and Joyce Sexton. Controversy was stirred with the public release of tapes recorded during Sexton's psychotherapy (and thus subject to doctor-patient confidentiality), wherein Sexton revealed incestuous contact with her daughter. Psychiatrist Criticized Over Release Of Poet's Psychotherapy Tapes By Ken Hausman Illness and subsequent career Sexton spoke candidly about her battle with clinical depression, which she fought for most of her life. Her first nervous breakdown took place in 1954. After a second breakdown in 1955, she met Dr. Martin Orne at Glenside Hospital, who encouraged her to take up poetry, and she enrolled in her first poetry workshop with John Holmes as the instructor. After the workshop, Sexton experienced remarkably quick success with her poetry, with her poems accepted by The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, and the Saturday Review. Sexton's poetic life was further encouraged by her mentor, W.D. Snodgrass, whose poem, "Heart's Needle" encouraged her to write "The Double Image," a poem significant in expressing the multi-generational relationships existing between mother and daughter. While working with Holmes, Sexton encountered Maxine Kumin, with whom she became good friends throughout the rest of her life. Kumin and Sexton rigorously critiqued each other's work, and wrote four children's books together. She attended a poetry workshop with Sylvia Plath, taught by Robert Lowell in 1957. Sylvia and Anne remained friends and were rumored lovers. This relationship is alluded to in the poem "Sylvia's Death" written after Plath's suicide. Later, Sexton herself taught workshops at Boston College, Oberlin College, and Colgate University. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the manic elements of Sexton's illness began to affect her career. She still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry. She also collaborated with some musicians, forming the group Anne Sexton and Her Kind, who were working to put some of her prose to music. Content and themes of work Sexton is the modern model of the Confessionalism (poetry). She was inspired by the publication of Snodgrass' "Heart's Needle." Sexton helped open the door not only for female poets, but for female issues; Sexton wrote about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, then adultery before such issues were even topics for discussion, helping redefine the boundaries of poetry. The title for her eighth collection of poetry, The Awful Rowing Toward God, came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, although he refused to administer the last rites, did tell her: "God is in your typewriter," which gave the poet the desire and willpower to continue living and writing for some more time. Death On October 4, 1974 Sexton was having lunch with Maxine Kumin to review her most recent book, The Aweful Rowing Toward God. Then without a note or any warning to anyone she went in to her garage, started the ignition of her car, and died of carbon monoxide poisoning. In an interview over a year before her death she told an interviewer that she had written the first drafts of The Aweful Rowing Toward God in 20 days with "two days out for despair, and three days out in a mental hospital." She went on to say that she would not allow the poems to be published before her death. She is buried at Forest Hills Cemetery in Jamaica Plain, Boston, Massachusetts. Awards In 1967, she won the Pulitzer Prize for her third poetry collection, which was Live or Die. Sexton never garnered any collegiate accolades or even a degree. Bibliography 
Courtesy of: http://www.wikipedia.org/ |
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