“I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch.”
April is National Poetry Month!
Today, we explore Anne Sexton (1928-1974), an American writer most famous for her dark expressive style known as “confessional poetry”. Sexton’s verses often revealed the personal details of her life, which was marked by bouts of depression, hospitalizations, suicide attempts and bi-polar disorder.
She was born Anne Gray Harvey on November 8, 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts, the daughter of Mary Gray Harvey and Ralph Churchill Harvey. She was educated at boarding school in Lowell and worked as a model for the Hart Agency in Boston. There is, reportedly, some evidence that she may have been abused as a child. At the tender age of nineteen, Anne married Alfred Muller Sexton II. They had two children, Linda Gray Sexton and Joyce Ladd Sexton.
In 1954, after the birth of her second daughter, Anne suffered postpartum depression and was diagnosed with bi-polar disorder. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, encouraged her to write poetry as a form of therapy. She joined several writers groups and eventually developed friendships with literary greats such as Maxine Kumin, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath. They exchanged ideas in salons and discussion circles.
Her writing did not go unnoticed. During her lifetime, Anne Sexton was the recipient of numerous awards. These included: the Frost Fellowship, the Radcliffe Institute Fellowship, the Levinson Prize, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Fellowship, the Shelley Memorial Prize, and an invitation to read at Harvard. She also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Ford Foundation and honorary degrees. She held professorships at Colgate University and Boston University. In 1967 she won a Pulitzer prize for her book Live or Die.
Yeah, that’s a LOT of accomplishments. especially for someone with bi-polar disorder!
Nonetheless, all of it meant little. As it turned out, Live or Die was a prophetic title. Anne took her own life in 1974.
The story of her death is as follows: On October 4, 1974, Anne had lunch with Maxine Kumin. They discussed revisions for Anne’s manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God, scheduled for publication in March 1975. Upon returning home, Anne put on her mother’s old fur coat and drank a glass of vodka.
She then removed all her rings, locked herself in her garage and started the engine of her car. She died of carbon monoxide poisoning.
Weirdly, in an interview a year before her death, Sexton had requested that she did not want her poems from The Awful Rowing Toward God to be published until after she died. She also claimed she had written the book “in 20 days with two days out for despair and three days out in a mental hospital.”
To this day Sexton’s work remains acclaimed in literary circles. Her haunting and vivid lyrics are not easily forgotten. This short poem, Her Kind, uses medieval witch and fairy tale imagery as metaphors for women’s roles, expectations, and the alienation they can bring. Critics have interpreted it as an exploration of death and sexuality.
Her Kind
I have gone out, a possessed witch,
haunting the black air, braver at night;
dreaming evil, I have done my hitch
over the plain houses, light by light:
lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind.
A woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I have been her kind.
I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods;
fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:
whining, rearranging the disaligned.
A woman like that is misunderstood.
I have been her kind.
I have ridden in your cart, driver,
waved my nude arms at villages going by,
learning the last bright routes, survivor
where your flames still bite my thigh
and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I have been her kind.
What do you think of Anne Sexton and her poetry? Let me know in the comments!
Histories and Mysteries 