Anne Sexton: A Poet of Personal Conflict and Self-Expression Anonymous 11th Grade

“Live or die, but don’t poison everything”. These words were said by Anne Sexton, a 20th century poet, whose poems dealt with the complexities of her tragic personal life, including the dysfunctional and often disturbing relationships with her children, husband and parents. Born to a wealthy family in Massachusetts in 1928, Sexton dealt with severe depression all throughout adulthood and actually began writing her poems as a coping mechanism, first suggested by her therapist at the time. She was consumed by the idea of death, especially her own impending one, an obsession of hers which largely influenced much of her work. She specialized in confessional poetry, a style that emerged and found popularity in the 1950s and 1960s, also seen in the works of other famous poets at that time such as Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell. Finding enormous success within her genre, Sexton joined the celebrity ranks of poets as the poems she had begun writing as a hobby became a full-time occupation with an unexpectedly large audience. However, some did not welcome this new style of confessional poetry because of the sense of intense intimacy Sexton’s poems created through their connection with her personal life. Despite the criticism she...