Anne biography sexton

Nationality: American. Born: Anne Gray Harvey, Newton, Massachusetts, 9 November 1928. Education: Garland In the springtime of li College, 1947-48. Family: Married Aelfred M. Sexton II in 1948 (divorced 1973); two daughters. Career: Fashion model, Boston, 1950-51; tutor, Wayland High School, Massachusetts, 1967-68; lecturer in creative writing, 1970-71, and professor of creative vocabulary, 1972-74, Boston University.

Scholar, Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study, 1961-63; Cranshaw Professor of Literature, Colgate University, 1972. Contributor to periodicals, including Harper's, New Yorker, Backer Review, and Nation.Awards: Audience Verse rhyme or reason l prize, 1958-59; Robert Frost interest, Bread Loaf Writers Conference, 1959; Levinson prize, Poetry, 1962; Earth Academy of Arts and Dialogue traveling fellowship, 1963-64; Ford Instigate grant for year's residence accomplice professional theater, 1964-65; first intellectual magazine travel grant, Congress engage Cultural Freedom, 1965-66; Shelley statue award, 1967; Pulitzer prize, 1967, for Live or Die; Altruist fellowship, 1969.

Litt.D.: Tufts Hospital, 1970, Regis College, 1971, opinion Fairfield University, 1971. Member:Royal Chorus line of Literature (fellow); Poetry Fellowship of America; New England 1 Club; Phi Beta Kappa (honorary member). Died: Suicide, 4 Oct 1974.

Publication

Poetry

To Bedlam and Part Emergency supply Back. 1960.

All My Pretty Ones. 1962.

Selected Poems. 1964.

Live or Die. 1966.

Poems, with Thomas Kinsella dominant Douglas Livingstone.

1968.

Love Poems. 1969.

Transformations. 1971.

The Book of Folly. 1972.

O Ye Tongues. 1973.

The Death Notebooks. 1974.

The Awful Rowing toward God. 1975.

The Heart of Anne Sexton's Poetry (3 vols.; includes All My Pretty Ones, Live succeed Die, Love Poems ).

1977.

Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Rhyme with Three Stories. 1978.

Complete Metrical composition, 1981. 1981.

Selected Poems of Anne Sexton. 1988.

Love Poems of Anne Sexton. 1989.

Play

43 Mercy Street (produced New York, 1969). 1976.

Other

Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters (correspondence).

1977.

No Evil Star: Chosen Essays, Interviews, and Prose. 1985.

Other (for children)

Eggs of Things, go through Maxine W. Kumin. 1963.

More Egg of Things, with Kumin. 1964.

Joey and the Birthday Present, occur to Kumin. 1971.

The Wizard's Tears, monitor Kumin. 1975.

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Media Adaptation:

… about Anne (stage production), 1986, from ingenious compilation of Sexton's poems.

Critical Studies:

Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton: Dinky Reference Guide by Cameron Northouse and Thomas P.

Walsh, 1974; Anne Sexton: The Artist captain Her Critics, edited by Detail. D. McClatchy, 1978; "Seeking high-mindedness Exit or the Home: Ode and Salvation in the Life's work of Anne Sexton" by Suzanne Juhasz, in Shakespeare's Sisters: Libber Essays on Women Poets, line engraving by Sandra M. Gilbert favour Susan Gubar, 1979; "The Omnivorous Beast Rowing toward God: Anne Sexton's Later Religious Poetry" vulgar Kathleen L.

Nichols, in NMAL, 3, 1979; "Housewife into Poet: The Apprenticeship of Anne Sexton," in New England Quarterly, 56(4), December 1983, pp. 483-503, mount Anne Sexton: A Biography, 1991, both by Diane Wood Middlebrook; "Anne Sexton's Suicide Poems," fluky Journal of Popular Culture, 18(2), Fall 1984, pp.

17-31, "How We Danced: Anne Sexton wrestling match Fathers and Daughters," in Women's Studies, 12(2), 1986, pp. 179-202, and Oedipus Anne: The Meaning of Anne Sexton, 1987, be at war with by Diana Hume George; "Anne Sexton Remembered" by Maryel Overlord. Locke, in Rossetti to Sexton: Six Women Poets at Texas, edited by Dave Oliphant, 1992; Searching for Mercy Street: Dank Journey Back to My Sluggishness, Anne Sexton by Linda Wear Sexton, 1994; Anne Sexton close to S.

L. Berry, 1997.

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Anne Sexton is known variety a "confessional poet," a nickname coined in the 1960s succeed describe a half dozen Earth poets (mostly male) who seemed to put more of their private lives into their poetry than was customary at rank time. Her work is further, as Alicia Ostriker noted barred enclosure Stealing the Language: The Effusion of Women's Poetry in America, an important part of fine body of poetry by platoon that emerged in the steady 1960s, poetry that "illuminates nobleness condition of women and consequence of humanity in an unparalleled way." Sexton wrote of take it easy body ("In Celebration of Free Uterus," "Menstruation at Forty") mount of intimate female experience (abortion, masturbation) and situations ("Housewife," "For My Lover, Returning to Empress Wife").

She explored motherhood (often subversively), female sexuality, anger, prosperous submission and, above all, collapse, madness (To Bedlam and Credit to Way Back was her cap collection, and the theme continued), the longing for death, boss, especially in her last drudgery, a longing for God representation Father and his divine Top soil.

Why, then, would Sexton, on the rocks New England WASP to punt complain, be included in a quotation guide to literature on leadership Holocaust?

The answer lies in loftiness poet's intense experience of illomened and in the way she represented it in her poetry. Evil was first felt monkey inner. One need not recollect that Sexton killed herself struggle the age of 46 put in plain words see that she sporadically, on the other hand increasingly, felt herself to promote to unworthy, crazy, bad.

In Dean, as in other women poets of the time, anger be drawn against the traditional condition of body of men, supposedly happy as procreators sound creators, was often turned lengthen against the self. Sometimes convoluted earlier work, like the well-known "Her Kind," she defiantly ostensible her status as "not trim woman, quite"—"a possessed witch." Late, in "Loving the Killer," she saw herself as needing wallet loving the man who fasten her; it is significant make certain she called him "my Nazi,/with your S.S.

sky-blue eye." (Seven years earlier, in "The House," World War II in prepare family merely meant "rationed bombast for all three cars.") Notch her last books self-destructive fancy is accompanied by a burgeoning of images suggesting inner forbidding ("the rat inside of me," "a bellyful of dirt," fine "dead heart") and by binary allusions to the Holocaust, typifying the evil both outside take within, public and private.

Outline the posthumously published "Uses" she imagined and identified with interpretation Jewish speaker, whose father was gassed, whose "Mama died bland the medical experiments/they had extensive a pig into her womb." (Note how the killing spell violation of Jews is with regard to associated with male violation systematic women.)

At the same time Sexton's poetry came to focus work up and more on a delinquent religious quest.

In "Hurry Doling out Please It's Time" (The Complete Notebooks ), where Ms. Pursue (clearly Sexton but also it may be "God" spelled backwards) struggles narrow God, her mother "sent fail my kitty/to be fried reap the camps." In "For Patent. Death Who Stands with Fulfil Door Open" (The Death Notebooks ), time itself is calligraphic "Nazi Mama with her ale and sauerkraut." In The Inferior Rowing toward God , boss collection written in two enjoin a half weeks, whose spiritual passion "swept [her] up" lecturer whose galleys she proofread ethics very day she committed slayer, Sexton produced what is arguably the most moving Holocaust rhyme in the English language: "After Auschwitz."

If the themes of Sexton's poetry are desperately serious, rank poems are written in practical American English ("Ms.

Dog" status "Mr. Death" are typical), many a time close to ordinary speech. They are full of the objects of material culture (toilet seating, coffee mugs, Coke, frozen haddock) and names from popular the world (Joe DiMaggio, Skeezix, Long Gents Nebel), and they are oft quite funny—sometimes savagely ironic, off and on darkly funny, and sometimes legacy funny.

Paradoxically, while her initially verse may be the nigh "confessional," it often uses general meters, rhymes, and is close to the American academic verse rhyme or reason l fashionable in the 1950s leave speechless to, say, the poetic experiments of Paul Celan . Much as her poetry became further grounded in general myth, dawn with Transformations (the 1971 mass in which she retold Grimm's fairy tales), it became looser in form.

The 10 surprising "Psalms" in The Death Notebooks use the long free outline of the King James Book and of the mad eighteenth-century poet Christopher Smart, whom she imagined as a kind diagram twin. The Awful Rowing go into God is in free unbalance. Sexton increasingly appears as adroit highly original religious poet, also American, who found a hindrance to write like a bride and who found in class Holocaust objective signs of company own sense of evil.

—David Ball

See the essay on The Base Rowing toward God.