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Anne Sexton Biography

Page history last edited by alex_leoncio@... 14 years ago

     Anne Sexton was an American poet with a dark past. According to Angela Reich, a glimpse into Sexton’s past was revealed when Diane Wood Middlebrook released Anne Sexton: A Biography. Middlebrook wrote about a potential incestuous relationship between Sexton and her father, as well as her mother’s neglect. However, Kate Hibbard says that Sexton also suffered trauma from her father’s stroke and her mother’s succumbing to cancer. According to Reich, Middlebrook wrote that Sexton’s childhood was one of “loneliness and despair”. When she was a child, her great aunt was carried off to a nursing home, which traumatized Sexton into a fear of abandonment that carried on into her adulthood. As an emotionally unstable adult, she began to self medicate with alcohol and pills. When she was twenty-nine years old, her psychiatrist suggested poetry as a form of therapy; it was then that Sexton discovered her latent poetic talent.

 

     Because of her dark personal life, Sexton’s poetry is powerfully exquisite and popular. According to Hibbard, Sexton’s style of poetry has its origins in a movement in the late 1950s and early 1960s called the “Confessional School”. Poets from this movement deeply drew inspiration from their personal lives. Thus, according to Greg Johnson, Sexton wrote poetic fictions about women, about their relationships and female identity. One of her feminist works is her Transformations, a collection of poetic renditions of Grimm’s fairy tales; in her Transformations, Hibbard writes that Sexton “reflects [her] fascination with the cultural power of myth”. In two of her other poems, To Bedlam and Back and All My Pretty Ones, Sexton draws upon heart-wrenching subjects like her parents’ deaths and being institutionalized. In actuality, Johnson writes that much of Sexton’s poetry was characterized by a “search for identity [and an] infatuation with death”. With inspiration from the past traumas that drove her into emotionally instability and eventually suicide, Sexton’s confessional style brings great emotional power to her work.

 

Bibliography

Alex Leoncio

Comments (3)

Tonya Howe said

at 1:58 pm on Mar 26, 2010

Good work, Alex! Remember that we talked in tutorial about a more directed introductory sentence/concept, instead of beginning just with her birth. Also, don't forget to make your citation links go to the group bibliography page instead of individual citation pages. In order to avoid all the similar parenthetical references, you might introduce the author you're working with and then give a parenthetical citation as you finish working with that authors' ideas. For instance, "According to Johnson, yadda yadda yadda. More about Sexton from Johnson. Even more, etc. (Johnson). Hibbard, however, suggests....."

Tonya Howe said

at 2:00 pm on Mar 26, 2010

Joel and Alex--you might also note a good moment here to forge a link between your research annotations! (Joel is working on the book _Transformations_ as a context for the poem we're reading here.)

Tonya Howe said

at 1:33 pm on Mar 29, 2010

Nice revisions, Alex! I like how you gave your biographical essay a frame that wasn't arbitrarily constructed of life/death dates.

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