Anne Sexton
The third decade of the twentieth century brought on more explicit writers than ever before, but none were as expressive as Anne Sexton. Her style of writing, her works, the image that she created, and the crazy life that she led are all prime examples of this. Known as one of the most “confessional” poets of her time, Anne Sexton was also one of the most criticized. She was known to use images of incest, adultery, and madness to reveal the depths of her deeply troubled life, which often brought on much controversy. Despite this, Anne went on to win many awards and go down as one of the best poets of all time.
Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey on November 9, 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts to Ralph Churchill and Mary Gray Staples Harvey (Discovering Biographies 1). From then on, Sexton spent most of her life in the affluent, upper-middle class suburbs of Boston (Discovering Biographies 2). According to many of the experiences described in her poems, she led a very unhappy childhood that’s horrifying memories affected her throughout her life.
To overcome her troubles, she married at age nineteen and attempted to settle into the role of housewife and mother (Discovering Biographies 2). Shortly after her marriage, Anne enrolled in a modeling course at the Hart Agency and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore (Academy of American Poets 1). During this time Anne was also educated at Earland Junior College from 1947- 1948 (Twentieth Century American Literature 2). Through out her early twenties, Sexton began to experience bouts of depression that eventually led to hospitalization (Discovering Biographies 2). In 1955, after the birth of her second daughter, Sexton attempted suicide (Discovering Biographies 2). She was then placed under the care of Dr. Martin Orne, who encouraged her to write poems as a form of therapy (Discovering Biographies 1). “Poetry gave me a rebirth at age twenty-nine” (American Literature 3591), Anne quoted many times during her career. Anne deeply admired and attempted to emulate the confessional poem “Heart’s Needle” by Shodgrass (Discovering Biographies 2). Sexton decided to enroll in Robert Lowell’s graduate writing seminar at the Boston Center for Adult Education (Discovering Biographies 2). She then went on to be a scholar at the Radcliffe Institute for Independent Study from 1961- 1963 (American Literature 3596).
Everyone has once been someone that they aren’t necessarily ashamed of, but something they aren’t anymore. When you’re in school, everyone is different; between the popular kids, the jocks, the cheerleader, the dorks, the Goths, and all the other “types” of people. In “Her Kind,” Anne Sexton shows that she has been a lot of different women, and she is not them now. In this paper we will be diving into the meanings behind the displaced “I,” the tone and reparation, and who Anne Sexton really is and how that affects what she is trying to let people see through this poem.
The story of Anne's childhood must be appreciated in order to understand where her drive, inspiration, and motivation were born. As Anne watches her parents go through the tough times in the South, Anne doesn't understand the reasons as to why their life must this way. In the 1940's, at the time of her youth, Mississippi built on the foundations of segregation. Her mother and father would work out in the fields leaving Anne and her siblings home to raise themselves. Their home consisted of one room and was in no comparison to their white neighbors, bosses. At a very young age Anne began to notice the differences in the ways that they were treated versus ...
I choose to do my biographical paper on Margaret Higgins Sanger, because I admire the work that she done and that is continuing to be done, because of her. She was one of eleven children born to Michael and Anne Higgins; a Roman Catholic working-class Irish American family; on September 14, 1879, in Corning, New York. Margaret’s father a man of the bottle and one who enjoyed talking politics, rather than earning the money needed to take care of such a large family, therefore she spent most of her life in poverty. While I think her father had an impact on the person Margaret grew up to be; it was her mother that really shaped her into the person she was. Along with the eleven children she birthed, Anne also had many miscarriages, Margaret believed that it was the many pregnancies that took a toll on her mother's health and contributed to her early death at the age of 40. (BIO, 2014)
I have chosen to write about Virginia Woolf, a British novelist who wrote A Room of One’s Own, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, to name a few of her pieces of work. Virginia Woolf was my first introduction to feminist type books. I chose Woolf because she is a fantastic writer and one of my favorites as well. Her unique style of writing, which came to be known as stream-of-consciousness, was influenced by the symptoms she experienced through her bipolar disorder. Many people have heard the word "bipolar," but do not realize its full implications. People who know someone with this disorder might understand their irregular behavior as a character flaw, not realizing that people with bipolar mental illness do not have control over their moods. Virginia Woolf’s illness was not understood in her lifetime. She committed suicide in 1941.
Lydia Marie Child was born on February 11, 1802 and died on October 20, 1880. During her life she wrote in many forms and on various topics, but Lydia was more than just a writer. She wrote short stories, biographies, science fiction, serialized fiction, children’s literature, historical novels and antislavery literature (Karcher 6). She was also a journalist and a feminist, and wrote about the American Revolution and Native Americans. She helped Harriot Jacobson escape slavery, encouraged reform and was an abolitionist. But, before she could help others, Lydia had to fight for her own right to advance and succeed. Lydia was born in Medford, Massachusetts, as the sixth and youngest child of Convers and Susannah Francis. Susannah died when Lydia was twelve, and she was sent to live with a married sister until the age of nineteen. Although Mr. Francis encouraged the intellectual advancement of his sons, he discouraged his daughter, Lydia, from her fondness for books (Myerson 5). Lydia continued to read and learn, without her father’s encouragement or help, an...
I had the opportunity to read “Doctors” by Anne Sexton. My initial reaction to this text was that the poem is endearing, Sexton truly grasps the nature of not only doctors but also everyone who is involved with the care of a patient, from the doctors and RN’s all the way down to the CNA’s and Dietary Aids. All work with “herbs” whether it be a Doctor giving out painkillers or a Dietary Aid bringing a warm meal with a smile, all factors go into the “gentleness” and “do no harm” so that the patient will get better.
Throughout Anne Sexton's poem, society’s voice duels with the speaker's voice until the speaker's opinion begins effective and unwavering to endure in the end. The poem's speaker greets the stereotype of the witch and uses the two dueling voices throughout the poem to show that the stereotype is actually a positive, strong image for women and that it does not serve the degrading purpose society meant for it to
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Print.
As many of us know, our world today is not short of sarcasm. Many times sarcasm can be funny but other times it can cause harm. But in Anne Sexton’s poem, she uses sarcasm to throw her audience back to actuality, even a midst a fairytale element. In Anne Sexton’s poem, Cinderella she uses sarcasm and a basis of the true tale to make what many would call a “mockery” of the original Grimm Tale. Sexton does not refer to the Grimm brothers in her poem, for she considers this re-telling her own creation, uniquely by using irony to her advantage. As an audience we can relate to how and why Sexton takes much from the original versions, but we find that her interpretation brings a different approach. Sexton felt the original versions held no light to reality, so she changed the shallow premise of the original Cinderella bringing all the unrealistic morals in the story to the surface. The author's style, tone, and language helps to convey her sarcastic approach and differentiate between gritty reality and the ideal of fairy tale endings.
The poem "Her Kind" by Anne Sexton displays an aspect of the author’s life in a more emotional state. In the poem Sexton describes her journey of life as a woman; she remembers all the hardships she has been challenged with and emphasizes that her path through life was not all in sunshine. Throughout, the poem she uses incredible language to describe her hardships that she faced. She overall connects this to the fact that she is a woman. Anne is not angry at the fact that she has to face all the hardships as a woman but instead agrees that she is a brave woman. Although, her journey through life has made her feel constantly criticized as well as an outcast in the female world, she believed that she is just one of a kind.
There is no doubt that the literary written by men and women is different. One source of difference is the sex. A woman is born a woman in the same sense as a man is born a man. Certainly one source of difference is biological, by virtue of which we are male and female. “A woman´s writing is always femenine” says Virginia Woolf
While other writers use their poetry to decipher the meaning of life, Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea was busy writing about how to live it. Five of her poems, “Jupiter and the Farmer,” “The Tree,” “The Shepherd Piping to the Fishes,” “Love, Death, and Reputation,” and “There’s No To-Morrow,” convey strong messages to the reader about how to live their lives. In her poetry, Anne Finch uses anecdotes to help illustrate the validity of her statements, thereby providing the reader with a strong, meaningful, and important message about how life should be lived.
Sylvia Plath’s life was full of disappointment, gloominess and resentment. Her relationship status with her parents was hostile and spiteful, especially with her father. Growing up during World War II did not help the mood of the nation either, which was dark and dreary. At age 8 Plath’s father of German ancestry died of diabetes and even though their relationship was never established nor secure, his death took a toll on her. “For Sylvia, who had been his favorite, it was an emotional holocaust and an experience from which she never fully recovered” (Kehoe 90). Since she was so young she never got to work out her unsettled feelings with him. Even at age eight, she hid when he was around because she was fearful of him. When she was in his presence his strict and authoritarian figure had left an overpowering barrier between their relationship. Sadly enough by age eight Plath instead of making memories with her dad playing in the yard she resented him and wanted nothing to do with him (Kehoe). These deep-seated feelings played a major role in Plath’s poetry writings. Along with his “hilterian figure,” her father’s attitude towards women was egotistical and dismissive, uncondemning. This behavior infuriated Plath; she was enraged about the double standard behavior towards women. Plath felt controlled in male-dominated world (Lant). “Because Plath associates power so exclusively with men, her conviction that femininity is suffocating and inhibiting comes as no surprise” (Lant 631). This idea of a male-dominated world also influenced Plath’s writing. Unfortunately, Plath married a man just like her father Ted Hughes. “Hughes abandonment apparently stirred in her the memories and feelings she had struggled with when her ...
Confessional poetry of women poets of the then 1950s and 1960s opens a new vista for them to express their ‘self’ and to foreground their identity. These poets feel the need for self-affirmation because of their experience of marginalization in society. They found all the experiences are gendered in the 1950s and 1960s patriarchal society and so they also develop a gendered image of their ‘self’ in their confessional poetry. At the time when Sexton and Plath were children, the authoritarian figure within the nuclear family was the father and so he was the representative of society’s rule. Hence, the delineation of the Electra complex in their confessional poetry is one of the approaches of scratching their gendered ‘self’ because through the Electra complex the poets inscribe the female sexuality into the text. So, “with their autobiographical works, they write themselves into the canon and represent and deconstruct cultural images and linguistic codes of ‘woman’ and suggest alternative modes of self and identity” (Carmen
In “Briar Rose,” Anne Sexton utilizes a classic fairy tale to inform the reader of her own childhood experiences with sexual abuse. Instead of simply retelling the story, she puts a new twist on it and transforms it into an elaborate metaphor: Sexton is the Briar Rose from her own story. Not so much a cry for help as a plea for awareness, Sexton uses carefully crafted words to depict Briar Rose’s and her own struggle to expose the perpetrator of sexual abuse. She also uses her adaptation of the story to address how cultures view claims of sexual violence (particularly incest), marriage, and the relationship between genders.