ANNE SEXTON

There are probably lots of poets that have contributed a vast involvement in the world of literature. These poets became inspirations for modern-day poets for them to be able to have an interesting and appealing work of literature.

One of these poets is Anne Sexton. Anne Sexton is among the most celebrated and tragic poets of the confessional school.

Born Anne Gray Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, Sexton was the youngest of three daughters raised by her parents; her mother being a housewife and her father who was an owner of a prosperous wool company, in an upper middle-class home near Boston. Sexton graduated from Rogers Hall preparatory school for girls in 1947, where her first poetry appeared in the school yearbook.

Regarded as a confessional poet, Sexton's writing is in many ways a candid autobiographic record of her struggle to overcome the feelings of guilt, loss, inadequacy, and suicidal despair that tormented her. Inspired by years of intensive psychotherapy, Sexton's carefully crafted poetry often addresses her uncertain self-identity as a daughter, wife, lover, mother, and psychiatric patient.

Sexton’s poems were said to represent her life and experiences as a woman. Not only as a woman alone but also as a daughter, wife, lover, mother, and a patient of psychiatry. She was able to put together these experiences using her pen and as an output, she was able to create appealing and great works of literature that were able to fill the hearts and interests of readers and critics.

Her experiences and life struggles were the main recipe for all her works. She used these struggles enable for her to convey the guilt, loss, despair that her self is experiencing. It was also a way for her to escape reality and put herself in a moment of isolation to the real world.

Her first volume, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, consists of poems written shortly after her confinement in a mental hospital, during which she lost custody of her children. "The Double Image," among the most accomplished works of the volume, is a sequence of seven poems describing Sexton's schism with her mother in the imagery of two portraits facing each other from opposite walls. Other poems, notably "You, Doctor Martin," "Music Swims Back to Me," and "Ringing the Bells" relate Sexton's experiences and emotional state while hospitalized. "Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward," which involves an unwed mother, who prepares to abandon her illegitimate child, alludes to Sexton's guilt at having lost her own children. Another significant poem from the volume, "For John, Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further," is Sexton's response to poet John Holmes's criticism of her transgressive subject matter, representing Sexton's defense of the confessional mode and her own poetic voice. The poems of All My Pretty Ones further illustrate Sexton's aptitude for invoking musical rhythms and arresting imagery. Entitled after a line from Shakespeare's Macbeth, this volume contains the oft-anthologized poems "The Truth the Dead Know," written upon the death of her father, "All My Pretty Ones," "The Abortion," and "Letter Written on a Ferry While Crossing Long Island Sound," all of which probe emotions surrounding loss.

Her obsession with death, a prominent recurring theme in all of her work, is explicit in the poems "Sylvia's Death," about Sylvia Plath's suicide, and "Wanting to Die," countered by the life-affirming poem "Live" at the end of the volume. Another poem which talks about death is the poem “The Death of Fathers”.

The themes of alienation, death, and deliverance are also evident in the poems “The Jesus Papers” in the Book of Folly and the poem “The Death Baby” which reveals the poet’s desire and admiration to death.

In the poem which she dedicated to her close friend Sylvia Plath, she represented death in a very creative way through imagery:

under our heart, our cupboard,

and I see now that we store him up

year after year, old suicides

and I know at the news of your death

a terrible taste for it, like salt,

(And me,

me too.

And now, Sylvia,

you again

with death again,

that ride home

with our boy.)

And I say only

with my arms stretched out into that stone place,

what is your death

but an old belonging,

a mole that fell out

of one of your poems?

She used the representation of death in a presence of our boy which is in fact a creative and very original way of making a poem. Such poem also talks about death that Sexton very much desired.

The poem “Wanting to Die” also shows an evident proof how Sexton very much values and loves death.

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

In this poem of Sexton, she freely chatters about suicide which is extremely related to her life for she has, for many times, attempted suicide for too much desire for death. Her poems are apparently correlated to the experiences that life has bestowed upon her. She is very much in ove with death that most of her poems are about it. She presents death in every possible representation and face that readers would not notice right a way just like what she did in her poem “Sylvia’s Death” where death is represented as a boy.

Another poem where death is present is the poem “Live” which is oppose to her other poem “Wanting to Die”. In here, she opposes what she wrote on the other said poem. She presses on the idea that she must continue to live and forget about death for there are many things in life that are beautiful and one of those would be the sun, the sun which she mentioned as the reason why she should and must live.

I promise to love more if they come,

because in spite of cruelty

and the stuffed railroad cars for the ovens,

I am not what I expected. Not an Eichmann.

The poison just didn't take.

So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,

repeating The Black Mass and all of it.

I say Live, Live because of the sun,

the dream, the excitable gift.

And just like her other poems, “The Death Baby” is a sequence of psalms that mostly talk about death. It is very visible through the use of her words that Sexton indeed desires death in a great extent and degree.

1. DREAMS

My sister at six

dreamt nightly of my death:

"The baby turned to ice.

Someone put her in the refrigerator

and she turned as hard as a Popsicle."

2. THE DY-DEE DOLL

My Dy-dee doll

died twice.

Once when I snapped

her head off

and let if float in the toilet

and once under the sun lamp

trying to get warm

she melted.

3. SEVEN TIMES

I died seven times

in seven ways

letting death give me a sign,

letting death place his mark on my forehead,

crossed over, crossed over

4.MADONNA

My mother died

unrocked, unrocked.

Weeks at her deathbed

5. MAX

Max and I

two immoderate sisters,

two immoderate writers,

two burdeners,

made a pact.

To beat death down with a stick.

To take over.

To build our death like carpenters.

6. BABY

Death,

you lie in my arms like a cherub,

as heavy as bread dough.

Although some critics were not able to see the real message and importance of Sexton’s poems, she, inspite of all the struggles that life offered her, was able to capture the interests and hearts of the readers. She up to now is considered as one of the best poets of her days and will always be remembered for her trademark having death as her recurring theme among her poems. Sexton remains among the most important female poets of her generation.