Sexton, Anne (1928-1974), was an American poet. She wrote about troubling, intimate experiences in a style intended to reveal raw feeling. Sexton dealt with such subjects as her mental illness, her sexuality, and her parents and children from a specifically female point of view. She began to write with the encouragement of her psychiatrist. Her poetry remains the vision of a disturbed suicidal individual, but it attempts to speak for modern experience as a whole. Her approach follows a trend set by the confessional poets Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, and Sexton’s former teacher Robert Lowell.
Sexton’s first book of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), describes her emotional difficulties, her first suicide attempt, and her first experience in a mental institution. She also uses these themes in Live or Die (1966), a book of poems that won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967.
Anne Harvey was born on Nov. 9, 1928, in Newton, Massachusetts. She briefly studied at the Garland School, a finishing school for women, before eloping in 1948 with Alfred M. Sexton II, a college student. Sexton committed suicide on Oct. 4, 1974. Her Complete Poems was published in 1981.
