Poetry Project: ANNE SEXTON BY: JULIA HOWARD PERIOD 2

Foreword  Anne Sexton’s poetry is like no other: a highly personal, confessional verse. She wrote from her heart and the darkest depths of her mind.  The words in her poetry truly reflect her life in every aspect. The themes of suicidal tendencies and thoughts, long battles of depression, mental illness, and deeply intimate descriptions and details from her private life.  The reason her writing has been praised is not just how relatable her words are, but also her ability describe messy human emotion. However, it is pertinent to understand Sexton’s personal life to truly grasp the meaning and intent of her poetry.

Early Life & Family Structure  Born Anne Gray Harvey on November 9, 1928 was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and spent most of her life near Boston.  She was born the daughter of Ralph Harvey, a successful woolen manufacturer as well as an alcoholic, and Mary Gray Staples.  Anne was raised in comfortable middle-class circumstances and would spend every summer on Squirrel Island in Maine.  She felt neglect from her parents and in the biography by Diane Middlebrook, she recounts possible sexual abuse by Anne's parents throughout her childhood; at the very least, Anne consistently felt that her parents were hostile to her and feared that they might abandon her.  Anne took refuge from her dysfunctional family in her close relationship with Anna Dingley, also referred to as “Nana” from Anne. This was her great-aunt who lived with the family during Anne's formative years as an adolescent. She dearly loved and admired her aunt, so when her aunt experienced a breakdown and hospitalization due to mental illness later in life, Anne felt traumatized from this event.

The Adolescent Years  Growing up, as brilliant as Anne Sexton was, she strongly disliked school. It was not that she was not smart, but she could not seem to concentrate and had problems with disobedience.  Multiple teachers had suggested some form of counseling to aid Anne in school and whatever underlying problems she had. These suggestions her parents did not take and instead, sent her to Rogers Hall, a boarding school in Lowell, Massachusetts.  After she graduated, she only briefly attended what people called “finishing” school before she eloped with Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II at just nineteen. At the time, she was engaged to someone else. The years that followed were the years as young newlyweds, sometimes lived with their parents due to financial instability.  Anne was not writing much throughout these years because she mainly focused on being a wife, and during Kayo’s service in Korea, focused on fashion modeling. However, her other focus was on her multiple infidelities. These were committed during her husband’s absence while in Korea, and landed her in the beginning of her years in therapy.

What got her into Writing?  Anne became a mother in 1953 and her husband took a job as a traveling salesman in her father’s business. At this time, she was depressed after the death of her beloved Nana in This was the her first manic episode. After the birth of her second daughter in 1955, Sexton went back into therapy. She met Dr. Martin Orne, who became her long-term therapist at the Glenside Hospital, and encouraged her to take up poetry, thinking that this could be a positive coping mechanism. This was a vital time to Anne’s rebirth into writing. Although she had written in her teen years, she had not revisited writing until now.  Writing was meant to help her as a form of coping and therapy and turned into a career for her.

The Start of her Writing Career  Writing significantly helped Anne and the mental illness she was dealing with.  Sexton joined several Boston writing groups to grow in her writing ability in This is where she met and came to know some very well-known writers like Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell, George Starbuck, and Sylvia Plath.  Her poetry became central to her life and to her growth as an individual. From these groups and from practice, she mastered formal techniques.  Sexton lost both of her parents, and the memory of her difficult relationships with them led to further breakdowns in  The only way that Anne found any stability or a clear mind was through the route of poetry.  Like many other widely recognized confessional poets as W. D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell, Sexton was able to convince her readers that her poems echoed her life; not only was her poetry technically excellent, but it was meaningful to the midcentury readers who lived daily with the emotions she expressed in her poetry. This was also the beginning of her many publications and awards.  Her marriage was broken down by her affairs, by discord, and physical abuse as her husband saw his formerly dependent housewife become a celebrity.

Books, Plays, Honors, and Awards  To Bedlam and Pat Way Back (1960)  All My Pretty Ones (1962)  In 1967 Sexton received the Pulitzer Prize for poetry for Live or Die (1966),  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)  An invitation to give the Morris Gray reading at Harvard.  To follow these great awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship, Ford Foundation grants, honorary degrees, professorships at Colgate University and Boston University  Love Poems (1969)  Off-Broadway production of her play Mercy Street (1969)  Transformations (1972)  The Book of Folly(1972)  The Death Notebooks (1974)  The Awful Rowing toward God (1974)

The Death of Anne Sexton  Divorce, living by herself, an alcoholic who was battling depression, Sexton was lonely and seemed to be searching for compassion through love affairs.  She continued to be in psychotherapy, from which she evidently gained little solace. In October 1974, Anne Sexton killed herself asphyxiation by carbon monoxide in her garage in Boston.

Her Kind: The Background, speaker and Setting  It was published in 1960 in To Bedlam and Part Way Back.  There are few things known about the narrator – but one of them is that she's a woman. The speaker doesn't leave anyone in doubt about who's experiencing what she's about to describe due to the use of “I.”  For the speaker of this poem, getting away means retreating into fantasies about women as powerful and scary as she herself can be. It is those dreams that allow her to get in touch with the sorts of strength and power that are denied by what society has thought a woman should be.  All the poems’ three stanzas take place in three settings; strange snapshots of three different states, connected by a sense of having a long amount of time pass by that builds to its conclusion in the last stanza.  The dream in the poem, the images are there but the purpose is, at first, an uncertain one as flows from one scene to the next and the way the sentences travel, from longer collections of sensations and scenes, to, near the end of the stanzas, simple statements which complete each picture, adding a sudden sharp insight, a personal confession, and leading to the central meaning, “I have been her Kind.”

The “witch” of Her Kind  Throughout the entirety of the poem, she describes what a witch is as being a possessed.  The “possession” that she holds is that she is consistently on the move. This is a woman of the night, which sounds like she is the kind that take long journeys abroad.  She does not say it directly, but there is a sense that her journey is done alone, and she feels alone  It is vital that Sexton describes this woman as a witch. Witches have been involved in plays, movies, books, poetry for hundreds of year, and within each document that regards witches, they are considered and describes as misunderstood, persecuted, and outside the norm of society. This translates to the author trying to describe women as all those things—misunderstood, persecuted, and outside the norm of society.

The First Stanza  The speaker says she is “dreaming evil, I have done my hitch, over the plain houses, light by light.”  The hitch is her description of flying above the houses. She only says she is “dreaming.” However speaker's language is plain, honest and straightforward about her lonely nighttime wanderings.  The speaker follows her description of her nightlife up with a list of all the things which set her apart from the rest of the community. She decides that all these things equal to being unwomanly when she states, a woman like that is not a woman, quite.”  She is portraying that apparently society decides the standards of a woman, and not women themselves.  The last line, “I have been her kind,” changes the future of the poem, not just because it is the refrain, but that the "I" in line one isn't the same "I" that we see in line seven. The speaker distances themselves from the possessed, witch woman and her true self. This is to say that she is not what society makes her to be.

The Second Stanza  The speaker creates her own world away from society and its judgment when she states, “I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods.”  The list of what she has in her secret cave is not very descriptive. It does not discuss what it looks like and why she has them. Just like in stanza one, the first few lines of this stanza imagine the world of a woman who chooses not to participate in "normal" life or the life she is prescribed to be a part of.  The view and perception of society plow their way into her true self. By saying, “Whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood,” society describes her negatively as a misfit whom is “disaligned.”  Society dismisses her with negative connotations. It then follows back up with the refrain, by saying, “I have been her kind.” This makes it crystal clear that the woman is talked about in stanza one is not the same woman as the one in stanza two. They're similar, however, they lead different lives.

The Final Stanza  Almost every image is connected with her impending death, and the spectacle it is made. The witnesses watching coming to include even the reader.  The speaker says, “I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by,” in this gesture, there is something sad, fragile, but passionate and fierce. The naked arms is a symbol of her still human frailty, however, the speaker also seems to be making fun at the "villages going by." She is saying hello, waving, and greeting, the very people that are condemning her to death. She does not seem to care. From her apparent amusement, it is decided that she is unafraid of her soon to be death.  The lines shift into a present tense. The speaker is still feeling the crack of her bones and the heat of the fire when she says, “where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.” The fact that she is still feeling these painful events is her description of the torturous social interaction that she continually deals with. This leads the poem to the last line.

Meaning, Theme, Style, Technique, etc.  The speaker returns to the refrain when she says, “A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.”  This is her expressing how she had a sense of identification along with this “disaligned,” persecuted victim at society’s hands, and that regardless of what society wants, she is not going to try and please.  The tone is radiated from the images and the images and word choice are truly the key in unraveling Sexton’s meaning of this poem.  All the figurative language contributes to the overall meaning that Sexton was describing. Sexton is explaining why a woman might feel so persecuted that she'd find it easy to identify with women who died because of society's screwed up conventions. That it is unfair to persecute those who live by different, but equal standards, and do not follow the conventions of society. Sexton is confessional and honest in her way of displaying this meaning.

The Great Confessional Poet  Anne Sexton led a troubled life, however from her struggles and hardships; she found peace through her writing. Her poetry gave her a life at one point she thought she no longer had and saved her for a little while.

Works Cited  Anne Sexton - Anne Sexton Poems - Poem Hunter. "Anne Sexton - Anne Sexton Poems - Poem Hunter." Poemhunter.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Mar  "Anne Sexton: Poems." Hello Poetry. N.p., n.d. Web. 06 Mar  "Anne Sexton." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 03 Mar  Bloom, Harold, Stephen Berg, David Bonanno, and Arthur Vogelsang. The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.  Hall, Caroline King Barnard. Anne Sexton. Boston: Twayne, Print.  Houlihan, Mary. "Anne Sexton Mixing Poetry and Emotion." Chicago Sun-Times. N.p., 25 Jan Web. 6 Mar  Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography. New York: Vintage, Print.  Poets.org. Academy of American Poets, n.d. Web. 01 Mar  Sexton, Anne, and Barbara Swan. Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Print.  Sexton, Anne, Linda Gray Sexton, and Lois Ames. Anne Sexton: A Self-portrait in Letters. N.p.: n.p., n.d. Print.  Sexton, Anne. Live or Die:. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Print.  Sexton, Anne. To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Print.