The cry of a gull is beautiful and the cry of a crow is ugly
but what I want to know is whether they mean the same thing.... †

Anne Gray Harvey was born November 9, 1928 to Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts.

Anne Gray Harvey Sexton died October 4, 1974 at the age of forty five, having successfully completed suicide at her home in Boston.

Anne Sexton was a stunningly beautiful woman, tortured beyond help, a brilliant confessional poet. She broke new and exciting ground. She broke the rules and the literary expectations; which in regards to Anne, was always left holding it's collective breath.

One of the most important poets of our time, she was extremely important to women poets and writers, and that largely goes unsung.
Her shocking revelations, her unconventional conversations with herself and with her readers, were quite untidy socially at the time they were written.

She created permission. Permission for women to write freely of menstruation, abortion, madness, abuse and death, without fear.
To speak the truths of human nature, desire, illness, frailty, obsession.
Her words were bloody raw on the page. She never minced. She allowed them to pour out in torrents.

Anne Sexton gave us crucial pieces. For poetry, for prose, for truth.

Meanwhile you pour tea with your handsome gentle hands. Then you deliberately take your forefinger and point it at my temple, saying,
"You suicide bitch! I'd like to take a corkscrew and screw out all your brains and you'd never be back ever. " And I close my eyes over the steaming tea and see God opening His teeth. "Oh," He says. I see the child in me writing "Oh." Oh, my dear, not why. ‡

Anne Sexton is as intricate to poetry now as she was in her time. She has left a heart full and more for us to study, extract from, and take pride in as poets and readers of poetry.

However controversial her poetic content; her seemingly deliberate intent of shocking hair into curls with her words of blood and babies, vaginas and thighs, however harshly the critics lashed at her she remained true to her self. True to her vision and her words.

This tenacity and golden abandon saw Anne Sexton achieving honors and awards from virtually the moment she published her first collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back in 1960.

Writing of drug addiction, incest and masturbation, she didn't back down from her vision and at times, her critics extracted heavy prices from her self doubt, fear, and her oft times fractured psyche through their harsh reviews and outraged condemnations.

Anne's troubled life and her lifelong battle with depression, self alienation, and suicide attempts is well known. Her poetry allowed us inside of the personal world she railed within.

At the time Anne began her journey with the confessional, Sylvia Plath; whom Anne would befriend, was feverishly working on her own confessions of despair.

Robert Lowell and W.D. Snodgrass were doing the same with Snodgrass' Heart's Needle, providing a haunting glimpse into the troubled soul's journey through familial heartbreak.

All in all I'd say, the world is strangling. And I, in my bed each night,
listen to my twenty shoes converse about it. And the moon, under it's dark hood, falls out of the sky each night, with it's hungry mouth to suck at my scars. ±

In those puritan times where Anne lived and wrote, she was often accused of exhibitionism. Anne's closest friend and fellow poet Maxine Kumin; who also co-wrote with Anne four children's books says:

"Women poets in particular owe a debt to Anne Sexton, who broke new ground, shattered taboos, and endured a barrage of attacks along the way because of the flamboyance of her subject matter, which twenty years later,seems far less daring"....."Time will sort out the dross among her poems and burnish the gold. Anne Sexton has earned her place in the canon." ¹

Unlike many of her contemporaries Anne had no formal education to speak of. She was not traditionally educated on Milton, Eliot, or even Yeats. She often bemoaned her lack of college degree and this many times caused her to doubt her own writing. Yet Anne read voraciously whatever she could get her hands on, forming her own personal and literary judgements.

Anne also incessantly studied psychiatric texts. Ironically, for several years psychiatrists across the country directed their patients to Anne Sexton's writing in the hopes that through her poetry, she could somehow give voice to their suffering, a validation of illness and health, acceptance and understanding, opportunities for healing; though Anne herself could not heal Anne.

Anne definitely forged her own way despite her critics and despite herself. She admired and became a constant student of the workshop; later she would teach these workshops. Although Anne Sexton was "self taught" she gathered many honorary doctorates and fellowships, as well as being the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967 for her collection " Live or Die."

One must be a prisoner just once to hear the lock
twist in his gut. After all that, one is free to grasp at the trees, the stones,
the sky, the birds that make sense out of air. Τ

In her lifetime, Anne Sexton would publish eight volumes of poetry.

Posthumously, the two collections of poems she was working on at the time of her death would be prepared and released by her estate executor: daughter Linda Gray Sexton.

I don't think that one single volume of her work can be considered her finest, as all of her volumes were ahead of their time, and were technically clean.

Some of her volumes do speak louder than others, define a specific altered state of her being at the time, and her Love Poems and Transformations volumes are exceptional.

Anne's poetry towards the end of her life became more abundant; if possible. Her lines became shorter and more urgent. All else in her life seemed to fall down around and within her. Thus, her poetry she coveted as her God and saving grace.

Many in her life agree that Anne may had left many years earlier, had it not been for her poetry. At the least, Anne Sexton had always lived with one foot in the next world, ready and eager to go, yet afraid of it and also numb to it's fatal finality.

Anne Sexton didn't make mental illness okay, she made it real. She served it up in the mashed potatoes and to the stiff and strict world of her time, forcing the hush hush into the mainstream consciousness.

She shocked, yes. She embarrassed the seemingly un-impressionable, yes. But she made every one pause to contemplate this kaleidoscope she opened up for them.

Anne not only gave women writers and women in general crucial pieces, but she gave poetry itself crucial pieces. To exist and be. To show as dirty and real as life truly is some times, it is okay. It is part of who we are. Why poetry exists at all.

Poetry does not exist merely for the springtime, rainbows, or birthing of new life; all of that is poetry too and there must be roses amongst the thorns. Poetry exists and continues more so because of the sorrow, the madness, the despairing of the soul.

This is what Anne Sexton made the literary and mainstream society of her day remember. And she would have them remember it today.

Audience Magazine Annual Poetry Prize: 1959
Poetry Magazine Levinson Prize: 1962
National Book Award nomination: All My Pretty Ones: 1963
American Academy of Arts and Letters: 1963
Ford Foundation Grant: 1963
Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature Great Britain: 1965
Shelley Memorial Prize: Live or Die: 1967
Pulitzer Prize in Poetry: Live or Die: 1967
Phi Beta Kappa Poet, Harvard: 1968
Guggenheim Foundation Grant: 1969
Tufts University Doctor of Letters: 1970
Crashaw Chair in Literature, Colgate University: 1972

Poetry and Prose:

To Bedlam and Part Way Back
1960
All My Pretty Ones
1962
Live or Die
1966
Love Poems
1969
Mercy Street  (2-act play performed at American Place Theatre)
1969
Transformations
1971
The Book of Folly
1972
The Death Notebooks
1974

Posthumous:

The Awful Rowing Toward God
1975
45 Mercy Street
1976
Anne Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters (edited by Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames)
1977
Words for Dr. Y.
1978
No Evil Star: Selected Essays, Interviews and Prose (edited by Steven E. Colburn)
1985

Children's books:
Co-Author: Maxine Kumin

Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
1963
More Eggs of Things (illustrated by Leonard Shortall)
1964
Joey and the Birthday Present (illustrated by Evaline Ness)
1974

Posthumous:

The Wizard's Tears (illustrated by Evaline Ness)
1975

† Sexton, Anne, 1974 The Death Notebooks
‡ Sexton, Anne, 1972 The Book of Folly ; "Oh"
± Sexton, Anne, 1973 Last Poems; "As it Was Written" : Aug. 4, 1974
Τ Sexton, Anne, 1975 The Awful Rowing Toward God; "The Evil Seekers"
¹ Kumin, Maxine, How It Was: Maxine Kumin on Anne Sexton; Foreword:The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton - Foreword copyright ©1981 Maxine Kumin