Anne Sexton

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Standard Name: Sexton, Anne
Birth Name: Anne Gray Harvey
Used Form: Mrs A. M. Sexton
AS , American poet of the mid twentieth century, flirted for most of her adult life with the idea of killing herself. Her poems are intensely personal, centred on death, as well as on psychic pain and the dilemmas of being a woman and especially a wife. Some are re-tellings of fairy tales. She also wrote a single play, several books for children, short stories, and a novel which she never finished.
Photograph of a black and white print of Anne Sexton. She is shown from the shoulders up, with her head resting on her hand, and she has jaw-length hair that is filled in with black.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
Friends, Associates Tillie Olsen
TO made many personal friendships with writers; Hannah Green , who was fifteen years younger, acted as her mentor.
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
198
She developed a close friendship with the poet Anne Sexton , from the time that...
Friends, Associates Sylvia Plath
In this class Sylvia met and befriended the poet Anne Sexton , like her a tortured soul, who eventually committed suicide in 1974.
Hayman, Ronald. The Death and Life of Sylvia Plath. Heinemann, 1991.
124
Blain, Virginia et al., editors. The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Yale University Press; Batsford, 1990.
Sexton wrote of her friendship with Plath, and of their recurrent...
Intertextuality and Influence Germaine Greer
The chapters are headed with quotations ranging eclectically through the international canon and counter-canon from Sophocles and The Ramayana of Valmiki (an ancient Indian epic) to Spike Milligan , via Charles Baudelaire , T. S. Eliot
Intertextuality and Influence Edna St Vincent Millay
Thomas Hardy (as reported by Elinor Wylie ) is believed to have said her poems were one of the only two great things in the United States, the other being the skyscraper.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
xiii, 290
To...
Literary responses Tillie Olsen
This story was chosen for New World Writing, where according to Anne Sexton (whose first story appeared in the same volume) it shines out like a miracle.
qtd. in
Reid, Panthea. Tillie Olsen: One Woman, Many Riddles. Rutgers University Press, 2010.
217
It also won the year's O...
Literary responses Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan , however, applies a withering pen to WC in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
Occupation Tillie Olsen
After this, following the example of Anne Sexton , she secured a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute , and moved for a year to Boston with her husband and youngest daughter. This fellowship was extended...
Publishing Jeni Couzyn
In the late 1960s a male friend of JC passed on to her a commission for an anthology of love poems by women. The publisher had delicate lyrics in mind, and was horrified at Couzyn's...
Textual Features Carol Ann Duffy
Critic Deryn Rees-Jones discerns widely varied influences on CAD 's work: mainstream English poets like Wordsworth , Robert Browning , T. S. Eliot , Auden , Dylan Thomas , Larkin , and Ted Hughes ...
Theme or Topic Treated in Text Margaret Atwood
These fifty selected essays and reviews include discussions of Adrienne Rich , Northrop Frye and Anne Sexton .
University of Alberta Libraries On-line Catalogue. http://www.library.ualberta.ca/.

Timeline

December 1953: Hugh Hefner launched his magazine Playboy,...

Building item

December 1953

Hugh Hefner launched his magazine Playboy, published in Chicago. The first issue featured a previously unpublished nude photo of Marilyn Monroe .
Solo: Search Oxford University Libraries Online. 18 July 2011, http://solo.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?vid=OXVU1&fromLogin=true&reset_config=true.

Texts

Sexton, Anne. 45 Mercy Street. Houghton Mifflin, 1976.
Sexton, Anne. A Self-Portrait in Letters. Editors Sexton, Linda Gray and Lois Ames, Houghton Mifflin, 1977.
Sexton, Anne. All My Pretty Ones. Houghton Mifflin, 1962.
Sexton, Anne. Live or Die. Houghton Mifflin, 1966.
Sexton, Anne. Love Poems. Houghton Mifflin, 1969.
Sexton, Anne. The Awful Rowing Toward God. Houghton and Mifflin, 1975.
Sexton, Anne. The Book of Folly. Houghton Mifflin, 1972.
Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Houghton Mifflin, 1981.
Sexton, Anne. The Death Notebooks. Houghton Mifflin, 1974.
Sexton, Anne. To Bedlam and Part Way Back. Houghton Mifflin, 1960.
Sexton, Anne. Transformations. Houghton Mifflin, 1971.