Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton Anne Sexton became one of the best known of the often-controversial Confessional poets. Anne Sexton wrote openly about menstruation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when these topics were forbidden in poetry. There’s possibly no other American in our time that has cried aloud publicly so many private details. In additional to focusing upon her emotional life, Sexton’s later work includes frequent allusions to mythology, fairy tales, and Christian …

…Poems, Live and Die, and Transformations. Of all the Confessional poets, none has had quite Sexton’s “courage to make a clean breast of it.” Nor has any displayed quite her brilliance, her verve, her headlong metaphors, her clear images, or her color. All in all, she used her psychotic life to make these poems run wild in our heads, and she also illustrated a way of writing that only Anne Sexton could have accomplished.