Anne+Sexton



Anne Gray Harvey-Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts on November 9,1928. She was the daughter of Ralph Harvey and Mary Gray Staples. She was raised in middle-class circumstances in Weston, Massachusetts. But she was never at ease with her life, Her father was an alcoholic, and her mother' wanted to be a writer but couldn't due to the fact of her husband being an alcoholic and had a frustrating family life. Anne left her dysfunctional family and went to live her great aunt, Anna Dingley. Anne felt as if her parents her parents would abandon her because they were hostile to her. Her aunt's later breakdown and hospitalization also traumatized her. Anne disliked school because of her inability to concentrate and occasional disobedience. Teachers urged Anne's parents to get her counseling, But they didn't. In 1945 they sent her to a boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts where she began to write poetry and act. After she graduated from there she briefly attended what she called a "finishing" school. Anne's beauty and sense of daring attracted many men, and at nineteen she eloped with Alfred "Kayo" Sexton II, even though she was engaged to someone else at the time. Then followed years of living as college student newlyweds, sometimes with their parents. Later, Anne became a fashion model. In 1953 Anne gave birth to her first daughter who she named Linda. Anne was depressed after the death of her great aunt and she also had her second child at this time, she went back to therapy. However her depression seemed to worsen and at times when her husband was gone, she would sometimes abuse the children. She made several attempts to kill her self which led to intermittent institutionalization, her parents disapproved of this. During these years, Sexton's therapist encouraged her to write. In 1957 Sexton joined several Boston writing groups, and she came to know writers such as Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath. Her poetry became the main part of her life.In 1959 Sexton unexpectedly lost both of her parents, and the memory of her difficult relationships with them--so abruptly ended--led to further breakdowns. Poetry seemed the only route to stability, though at times the friendships she made through her art, which led to sexual affairs, also were unsettling. Her marriage was torn by discord and physical abuse as her husband saw his formerly dependent wife become a celebrity. A famous poem of Anne Sexton was "Abortion". In 1962 Sexton published //All My Pretty Ones//. So popular was her poetry in England that an edition of //Selected Poems// was published there as a Poetry Book Selection in 1964. In 1967 Sexton received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for //Live or Die// (1966), capping her accumulation of honors such as the Frost Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (1959), the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship (1961), the Levinson Prize (1962), the American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship (1963), the Shelley Memorial Prize (1967), and an invitation to give the Morris Gray reading at Harvard. To follow were a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Foundation grants, honorary degrees, professorships at Colgate University and Boston University, and other distinctions. Sexton's reputation as poet peaked with the publication of //Love Poems// (1969) Within twelve years of writing her first sonnet, she was one of the most honored poets in America: a Pulitzer Prize Winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with poet Maxine Kumin to revise galleys for Sexton's manuscript of //The Awful Rowing Toward God//, scheduled for publication in March 1975. On returning home she put on her mother's old fur coat, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.

“I've grown tired of love  You are the trouble with me  I watch you walk right by” - Anne Sexton.

"Put your ear down down close to your soul and listen hard" -Anne Sexton.