Anne Sexton: The Suicide Poet

Anne Sexton:  The Suicide Poet

            Anne Sexton was an award-winning poet who committed suicide.  Her life began in 1928 and ended in 1974.  She began writing poetry as a teenager and continued to write throughout the remainder of her short life.  She is best known for her confessional poetry and for her repeated attempts and eventual success at suicide.

Sexton spent a large portion of her adult life seeking associations that led back into childhood.  Much of her poetry demonstrates the painful feelings discovered towards her family.  She was also greatly devoted to being a good wife and mother.  She eloped at the age of nineteen with husband Kayo and had two daughters, Linda and Joy.  Her poem “The Double Image” is addresses to her younger daughter Joy.  The poem is a narrative that uses many factual elements from Anne’s life.  “It reports that Sexton was hospitalized, attempted suicide, recuperated in her parents’ home; that her mother was diagnosed and treated for breast cancer and blamed Sexton for the illness; that Sexton attempted suicide a second time” (Middlebrook 85).

            I cannot forgive your suicide, my mother said.

            And she never could.  She had my portrait

            done instead.

            I lived like an angry guest,

            like a partly mended thing, an outgrown child.

            I remember my mother did her best.

            She took me to Boston and had my hair restyled.

            Your smile is like your mother’s, the artist said.

            Anne painted her mother and herself as similar images.  Then Sexton returns to

the question  of why she would rather die that love.

                        In north light, my smile is held in place,

                        the shadow  marks my bone.

                        What could I have been dreaming as I sat there,

                        all of  me waiting in the eyes, the zone

                        of the smile, the young face,

                        the foxes’ snare.

                        In south light, her smile is held in place,

                        her cheeks wilting like a dry

                        orchid; my mocking mirror, my overthrown

                        love, my first image.  She eyes me from that face,

                        that stony head of death

                        I had outgrown.

                        […]

                        And this was the cave of the mirror,

                        That double woman who stares

                        At herself, as if she were petrified.

            The last lines of the poem Sexton realizes that she is a similar image to her mother

in that she is a mother herself.

                        I remember we named you Joyce

                        So we could call you Joy.

                        […]

                        I needed you.  I didn’t want a boy,

                        Only a girl, a small milky mouse

                        Of a girl, already loved […]

                        I, who was never quite sure

                        About being a girl, needed another

                        Life, another image to remind me.

                        And this was the worst guilt; you could not cure

                        Nor soothe it.  I made you to find me.

            Anne Sexton did not publish her first book of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, until 1960.  By then her mental illness had resulted in a severe breakdown.  She also began to try regularly to commit suicide.  She used her poetry to write away her problems with mental illness.  Many times her family situation and her medical situation collided.  She compares her father to her doctors.  Her poem “More Than All the Rest” favorably compares the two while “The Poems I Gave You” has explicitly erotic content.

            Throughout her poetry Sexton questions her normality.  She questioned the reality of everyday life.  She believed the psychotherapy treatments she was receiving were a form of fraud.  She believed the doctors were not helping her, but making her worse by readjusting her views of what was real.  With urgings from her husband, Sexton enrolled in John Holmes poetry class.  Maxine Kumin was also in the class.  The two formed a tight bond of friendship that lasted until Anne’s death. 

Kumin was instrumental in the publication of Anne’s first book.   Anne called Kumin to ask her opinion on something she had written.  Anne said, “I’ve written something – I don’t know if it’s a poem or not.  Can I come over?”  The poem Anne had written was “Music Swims Back to Me.”  The poem appears in To Bedlam and Part Way Back with few changes from the earliest version shown to Kumin in 1957.  Kumin would later write the forward to The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton published in 1981.

Perhaps what Anne Sexton is best known for is her parallels to Sylvia Plath.  Both were confessional poets.  Both committed suicide.  The two communicated by letters quite often.  The death of Plath did not come as a surprise to Sexton sine they had, four years earlier, discussed their lust for death.  The announcement of Plath’s death led to a deep examination of Sexton’s own lust and her memories of Plath, which came out in the poem “Sylvia’s Death.”  The poem appeared in Live or Die published in 1966 and includes other poems such as “Suicide Note” and “Wanting to Die.”  The book examines Sextons own lust for suicide and her life as she saw it at the time.

But suicides have a special language.

Like carpenters they want to know which tools.

They never ask why build.

            Sexton repeatedly attempted suicide.  Her fame and success as a poet did not ease any of her psychological pain.  The stress of appearing in public to read her poetry depleted her.  During all this traveling and lecturing, Anne was working on her next book, Love Poems, which was finally published in 1969.  It was the first book she published as a celebrity.  Many of the poems focus on sexual gratification.  The sexual attitudes towards her therapists again became apparent.  She also admitted to her friends that she was having an affair with Dr. Zweizung during her treatment hours.  The poem “Eighteen Days without you is the final poem in that book.

            I hibernated under the covers

            last night, not sleeping until dawn

            came up like twilight and the oak leaves

            whispered like monkey, those hangers on.

            The hemlock are the only

            young thing left.  You are gone.

            Anne’s next big project was not poetry, but a play.  Mercy Street helped Anne come to terms with her guilty feelings towards her family.  She had finally learned that the people she resented and blamed for her mental condition were people too.  The play received good reviews off- Broadway, but was not as well received as her poetry.

            Within eight months after publishing Love Poems Anne published another book of poetry, Transformations.  This book is made up of seventeen long poems, which Anne considered to be experimental fiction.  Many of the poems draw their symbolism from fairy tales such as Sleeping Beauty and Rapunzel.  It was another successful book.

            During the year following Transformations, Sexton worked on two new volumes of poetry, The Book of Folly and The Death Notebooks.  The Death Notebooks was intended by Anne to be published posthumously.  She decided to publish the poems early because of her great love for the work and because, as she told others, she wasn’t going to die for a long time.  She seemed, for the moment, content.  She wrote:

            breakfast like a dream

            and the whole day to live through,

            steadfast, deep, interior.

            After the death,

            after the black of black,

            this lightness –

not to die, not to die –

that God begot.

            Then, things began to fall apart.  Kayo, Anne’s husband, became aware of the relationships she was having with other men, including her therapist.  Anne made up her mind to leave him.  She kept up her rigorous professional schedule, but at the same time, began toting a purse full of pills.  She was keeping company with a fan, Phil Legler.  The two began a passionate courtship.  He left when she pressured him to marry.

            Shortly after his leaving, Anne was hospitalized because of illness.  She would have episodes that appeared as if she was in a coma, but EEGs showed normal brain function.  She was released, but feared she would need extensive hospitalization, possibly permanent in the future.  She looked again towards suicide to escape that fate.

            Anne was consistently drunk and lonely.  She was afraid to die, but even more afraid to live.  She ended her life on Friday, October 4, 1974.  She was very deliberate about her method.  She lunched with Maxine Kumin to finalize The Awful Rowing Towards God, scheduled to be published in 1975.  After the lunch she went home, took all the rings off her fingers and put them in her purse.  She then went to the closet and put on her mother’s old fur coat.  She took a glass of vodka and went into the garage, got in her car, turned on the ignition and the radio.  No one who knew her was surprised to hear the news of her death.

Works Cited

Mariner Books.  The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin

Company, 1981.

Middlebrook, Diane Wood.  Anne Sexton: A Biography.  New York: Vintage Books,

1991.

Weatherford, Doris.  American Women’s History: An A to Z of People, Organizations,

Issues and Events.  New York: Prentice Hall General Reference, 1994.