Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was a student of Robert Lowell and a close friend to Sylvia Plath. She was counseled to begin writing poetry after an onset of depression following her second daughter's birth.

Sexton was a member of the "confessional school" of poetry. Her poetry was meant to be intimate and serve as "a shock to the senses" as she put it in an interview with the Hudson Review. She believed that reading poetry "should almost hurt." Later in her poetic career, she referred to herself as a sort of Imagist poet. This tendency can be seen in her later poem "The Room of My Life."

Her poetry often addresses taboo subjects. She addresses incestuous desire in the poem "The Death of Fathers." Suicide is the subject of the poem "The Starry Night," in which she describes her longing to be "sucked up" by the "rushing beast of the night" like a "drowned woman in the hot sky."

Sexton used her struggle with mental illness as fodder for poetry. Her first book of poems, To Bedlam and Partway Back, draws from her experiences during her mental breakdown, as well as her fears of her only partial recovery. Sexton won a Pulitzer Prize in 1967 and taught at Boston University. Regretfully, she committed suicide at the age of 45.

Sexton Reading Her Poetry
Her Poetic Career
An Interview with Anne
A Video of Sexton Reading

Photo Courtesy: University of California Santa Barbara

Information: Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry, 3rd Edition