Ideas for Anne Sexton paper

What made Anne Sexton start writing?

I believe that the key to understanding Anne Sexton’s poetry is by looking at her life. Her poetry changed as her life changed and that is very evident in her first book, “To Bedlam and Part Way Back.”

“Your business is watching my words. But I admit nothing”

writing about the issues that most writers would stay away from

Her first book was triggered by a nervous breakdown which is why she was seeing her doctors which I mentioned before. Sexton also said, “I wish my poems were gay sometimes. I am tired of my gloom and death” (Anne Sexton 51).

After reading that Anne Sexton had various visions throughout her life I believe it supported my ideas to why her poetry is so mysterious.

One thing I found interesting about this book is that Anne arranged the poems in chronological order because she said it might interest her readers.

The language and wording all pointed towards death until I got half way through the poem when Sexton wrote, “But you, my doctor, my enthusiast, were better than Christ; you promised me another world to tell me who I was” (Live or Die). The poem drastically changed in its mood and tone, and switched to a poem about wanting to live.

I also loved how the poems were not typical love poems, but I could see the touch that Sexton put on the poems.

I found these to be reminiscent of Sexton’s work because she is not afraid to bring chilling words to a fairy tale that a person would expect to be for a child.

I can hear the narrative voice in all of the poems but as I was reading them I was not thinking this was an Anne Sexton poem, but merely a poem about Cinderella, and for some reason that seemed to bother me.

I also liked the subtle reference to her father when she said, “and to the drowning man you were likewise kind”, probably pertaining to her father being an alcoholic all her life, which is a familiar topic with Anne.

Anne Sexton called her poem “O Ye Tongues”, “my last prayer”, and the reason I picked this poem from the others was because she used the same structure that Christopher Smart used in “Jubilate Agno.” In each psalm, as Sexton called them, she used “Let” and “For”.