Anne

Anne Sexton and Her Kind performing "Woman with Girdle" Layout Provided By FreeCodeSource.com - Myspace LayoutsI am obviously NOT Anne Sexton. I am a college student who loves poetry. I just recently had to do a project on Anne Sexton for a Modern Poetry class, so I decided to give Anne a Myspace to share what I've learned. She a remarkable woman, and a marvelous poet! I plan on posting some of her poetry as blogs a few times a month to start discussions, and so on. Enjoy! And thanks for the add.Brief Biography:
Anne Sexton was a young woman who found out that writing poetry gave her purpose to her life, and in many ways poetry saved her life. In addition to this, her poetry helped to pave new roads for other poets while broadening the expectations of subject matter in poetry in general. As a confessional poet, the majority of Sexton’s work was autobiographical. Therefore, it is important to learn about her life to make analysis of her work easier to understand.
Anne Gray Harvey was born November 9, 1928 in Newton Massachusetts and was the youngest of 3 girls. As a child, Anne was generally messy and fidgety, which would upset her father and his rigid expectations of the girls. Anne felt isolated from him and he usually treated her with more harsh words than the other two girls. Anne’s favorite and most affectionate relative was her Great-Aunt Anna Ladd Dingley, whom she called “Nana.” She acted as an extra Grandmother in the family and Anne and Nana lovingly called each other “Twin.”
Because Anne’s parents developed drinking problems, Nana became like a parent to her at age eleven. They were close to one another until Anne turned 13 and she began to discover boys. Soon after this change in their relationship, Nana’s health declined and, in a traumatic scene that would haunt Anne for the rest of her life, Nana was carried out and taken to a mental hospital.
Anne’s first romance was with a boy named Jack and it lasted for almost five years. When Jack broke off the relationship, Ann wrote her first poem; however, after her mother’s critical comments and cold remarks from her father, she stopped writing and didn’t start for ten more years.
Anne went to finishing school where she was engaged soon after, only to start an affair with another man name Alfred Muller Sexton II, who was called “Kayo.” He and Anne ended up eloping and one of Anne’s firsts jobs was modeling with her sister-in-law, Joan. Anne began to see a psychiatrist for the first time when her mother suggested that she do so rather than leave Kayo for a friend.
Anne and Kayo had been trying to have children and, after a miscarriage scare, in July of 1953 they had their first child, Linda. Nana died soon after Anne gave birth, and reading through the journal Nana had kept while living in the institution, Anne found that Nana had written: “No one came.” This tormented Anne for the rest of her life. In July 1955, Anne gave birth to their second daughter, Joyce Ladd, named to commemorate Nana.
Anne became nervous to be alone with the children, she began to have panic attacks when Kayo would leave the house, and developed fits of rage. She began to fear that if she were alone with her children she may kill them. One night she decided to kill herself, so she grabbed some pills and Nana’s picture in a frame and went to sit on the front porch. These acts were enough to get her treatment at Westwood Lodge and have the children taken away from her for a while. She was placed in an institution for three weeks after another overdose on her “kill me” pills.
Anne began to bring poetry to her Psychiatrist during her sessions. Dr. Orne gave her the first bit of what she considered encouragement about it. She believed that she had found something to do with her life, and this excited her. By December of that year, she had written over sixty poems. However, she still felt pressure and inadequacies around her family as her mother seemed to compete with her, still. When Anne started to attend a poetry class she felt as though she had finally found “my people.”
She began to have her poems published in Magazines. For Anne, her poetry and psychiatric sessions became almost inseparable in her therapy. When she was writing, she felt as though she was in a trance, much like when she was in one of her sessions. At the age of 29 is when Anne Sexton claims that she was reborn, working diligently to become a poet. In her class she met Maxine Kumin, who would become Anne’s life-long friend.
“Heart’s Needle” was a poem that truly touched Anne’s life and influenced most of her work afterward. She stated: “That is what a poem should do. Move people to action.” This poem changed her style to more autobiographical and emotion-based work, and she said that it is what moved her to begin to be ready to have her children come back to live with her.
In the 1960s Anne was showered with many different high honors and awards for her poetry, including being nominated for National Book Award twice, receiving the first Literary Magazine Travel Award from the International Congress of Culture Freedom, and being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “Live or Die.” In 1968 the rock group Anne Sexton and Her Kind was formed, which set her poetry to rock music of the time. She began teaching poetry at Mclean’s Hospital in Belmont. From 1969-72 her off-Broadway play, Mercy Street, was performed for the first time, she was awarded honorary doctor of letters and was promoted to a full Professor at Boston University.
Nearing the end of her life, Anne struggled more and more with suicidal thoughts. Many times she would be absent from her classes because she had been hospitalized for a recent attempt at taking her own life. On October 4th, 1974 Anne went through her day as though nothing was truly wrong. After having lunch with Sexton, Kumin later recalled how much better she felt Anne was doing. Later that day Anne went into her garage at her house and closed the door. She then turned on her car and the radio. Her suicide wasn’t necessarily a surprise to those she knew, but it was still shocking all the same.Sources http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/s_z/sexton/sexton.htm Anne Sexton: A Biography. Written by Diane Wood Middlebrook. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979.