Studii de Limbă și Literaturi Anglo -Americane [600055]

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UNIVERSITATEA DIN CRAIOVA
FACULTATEA DE LITERE
Studii de Limbă și Literaturi Anglo -Americane

CREATIVITY AND DEPRESSION TRANSPOSED IN
ANNE SEXTON’S POETRY

Coordinator Științific :
Prof. Univ. Dr. MIHAELA PRIOTEASA

Student: [anonimizat], 2017

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Contents:

I. Introduction …………………………………………… p.3
II. Anne Sexton’s Life ……………………………………. p.3
III. Creativity and Depression in Anne Sexton’s Work … p.5
IV. Conclusions ……………………………………………. p. 9
V. Bibliography …………………………………………… p. 9

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I. Introduction

Considering the fact that both depression and creativity are, at some point, part of our life, I
was led to an interest in Anne Sexton life and work because this magnificent poet chose to transform
her unhappiness and misery into art. Trying to understand and reading between the lines of her poems,
I came to the conclusion that Anne transposed all her depression into verses; she uses her talent to
create a gate way in order to keep breathing, this thought giving the birth of this essay.
This essay examines how depression and creativity are embroiling together in order to create
an extraordinary piece of art such as Anne Sexton’s poetry. Her work suggests that these two facets
are not different, on the contrary, they are strongly connected one to another. This essay tries to
demonstrate that these two ‘characters’, creativity and depression, make their presence felt in every
thought, feeling that Anne Sexton wants to suggest through her lyrics of her poems.
The paper will be divided into t wo parts: the first part will present a brief summary about most
important aspects of Anne Sexton’s life and about her work. I chose to write about her life because
there we can find significant and meaningful events that will provide a better understandin g of her
poems; and the second part that portrays the most suggestive and expressive of her poems in which
depression is the essence around everything revolves.

II. Anne Sexton’s Life

Anne Sexton (November 9, 1928 – October 4, 1974) was an American poet, known for her
highly personal, confessional verse . She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live
or Die . Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania , suicidal
tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her
husband and children.
Anne Gray Harvey was the third of three girls ; Jane was born in 1923 and Blanche was born
in 1925. Her parents were Ralph and Mary Gray Staples Harvey, whom biographer Diane Wood
Middlebrook described as a couple ‘out of a Scott Fitzgerald novel ’. They lived life at the fullest in
the height of the roaring 1920s. Anne’s father, Ralph was a successful businessman in the wool
industry and traveled extensively. Later when Anne would meet her husband Kayo, he too would
work in the woo l business and spend many days traveling – a separation that was devastating for
Anne. Ralph had but one sibling, a sister named Frances. Interestingly enough, Frances tried to commi t

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suicide when she was in her twenties.
In May of 1948, while planning her wedding to a young man, Anne met Alfred Muller Sexton
II, better known as K ayo. Three month later, the couple eloped and they married on August 16 in
Sunbury, North Carolina and honeymooned on Virginia Beach. In the beginning, Anne Sexton’s
relationship with Kayo was intense, happy, and sexually fulfilling, Sexton tried hard to become a good
housewife while Kayo continued taking premedical courses at Colgate University.
Motherhood and couplehood presented a variety of complicatio ns for Sexton. In 1953 she had
Joyce (Joy) Ladd. She found it impossible to care for her children and herself while Kayo traveled on
business. She would get into deep depressions and rage at her eldest, Linda. After Linda’s birth, she
was diagnosed with po st-partum depression. Shortly after Joy’s birth, Anne tried to commit suicide
and this led her to Dr. Martin Orne who became a major player in Sexton’s life. It was Dr. Orne who
encouraged her to take up poetry.
During the next few years, she took part in workshops led by poets Robert Lowell and W.D.
Snodgrass and met many of the writers who would help her shape her career, including George
Starbuck and Maxine Kumin. It was in Lowell’s workshop that Sexton befriended poet Sylvia Plath.
After he r publication To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), a collection of poems detailing her mental
illness, Sexton developed a reputation as a confessional poet with a raw, fearless, often funny voice.
During the 1950s and 1960s, Anne Sexton made art out of ment al and emotional anguish.
Identifying with death and fighting off suicidal drivers were part of Sexton’s artistic
personality. Her traumatic childhood memories could not let her be (even her husband became the
image of her father) and she used confessional poetry as a sort of healing ritual for the discourse of
punishment and reconciliation between the self and the partner.
After twelve suicide attempts (all with medication) Sexton changed her method for her final
suicide act. It is believed that writing might have helped her survive longer than she might have done
in different circumstances, because therapy in itself seems to have done little in changing her behavior.
Anne Sexton remained alive in the history of lyrics described as the ‘High Priestess’ and the ‘Mother’
of confessional poetry, and as ‘the most persistent and daring of the confessionalists. It has been said
that no poet was more consistently and uniformly confessional that Anne Sexton… her name has
almost become identified with the genre’1. Sexton herself commented, ‘at one time I hated being
called confessional and denied it, but mea culpa . Now I say that I’m the only confessional poet ’.2

1 R. Phillips, The Confessional Poets , Carbondale, 1973, p.6.
2 Sexton, A., Anne Sexton: A Self -Portrait in Letters , Boston, 1973 , p.372.

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In some critical views, Anne Sexton has been associate d to confessional poetry, as being
highly subjective, since her verse related the psychotherapy problems, mental disorder, and biography
of the author. At the same time, Anne Sexton’s discourse introduces poetic voices in conflict that
negotiate on life, on death, to her thresholds into an imaginary world.
The movement of confessional poetry represented an important change of t he way in which
most poets approached the creation in the early 60s in America. Entering the autobiographical
elements in poetry, decreasing the distance between the poet and the reader, the powerful emotional
tone, but also the narrative structure become the new landmarks of a different kind of poetry, relaxed
and colloquial.
What Anne Sexton manages to transmit through her poetry is the femininity of the poetic
message by addressing issues of personal confession, love, and vision of men, woma n’s condition or
personal space. Confession poetry is subjective, causing the reader to empathize with the poet’s states
which are representations of the modern man looking for a lost center with irony, despair and extreme
sincerity.

III. Creativity and Depression in Anne Sexton’s Work

Anne Sexton is a consecrate American poet that belongs to modernity through the theme,
structure and obsessively recurrent motifs of life and death. Although depression and suicidal
predispositio ns were often her most devoted companions, she so mehow succeeded to put life and
loviness into a work of art whose exclusiveness would turn Anne Sexton into one of the most popular
and appreciated female writer of the 20th Century.
Anne Sexton is the poet who succeeded to break many of the taboos of femininity in the poetry
of the 1960s. The relation with her mother, with God, with her lovers, and with herself represents just
the few of the many themes approached with sin cerity by the American poet who keeps her own
mythology.
In her work, somehow we are the witness es of a miracle, we see something that never
happened before, something who enjoyed such good reviews from the readers . We can assume that
depressi on it is some kind of a disease, something from which we only have to do is to escape, to fight
for our salvation, but for Anne Saxton, depression is her most powerful w eapon and with the help of
this sickness she achieved notoriety, her memo ry remained al ive through time, we might say that
depression is the fuel of her creativity and uniqueness.

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As Susan Gubar points out in The Blank Page and The Issues of Female Creativity (1981) : ‘a
life experienced as an art or an art experienced as a kind of life’ (p.252), we can turn to the thought
that traditional conventions of producing art may seem unnecessary for Anne Sexton, who was in the
search of an identity and that is way we can assume that confessional poetry together with other ways
of person al touch and expression such as letters or autobiographies, was a way of celebrating her
creativity; she embraces her depression in order to create something that put many literary critics and
readers in difficulty.
When I discovered Anne Sexton I was surprised of the timeless of her poetry. Unfortunately ,
her poetry was translated in Romania n language only fragmentary. Anne Sexton, especially by
volumes Live or Die (1967) and Love Poems (1969), exploited authenticity and biographism, from
where the public no longer distinguish whether her poems were anything else but simple emissions of
some psychiatric problems. Death, suicide, love and motherhood represent s cardinal points in Anne
Sexton’s volumes. Throu gh her existential revolt, the poet is in feminine literature equal to the cursed
poets, and in particular, equal to Rimbaud, who is considered to be the ‘black poet’. In the poem Again
and Again and Again from the volume Love Poems she says she has a ‘dar k presentation’ ( I have a
black look ) – vision of the woman who lives in a dead space, of terrors and neuroticism.
By the act of suicide, Sexton has shown to the world that poetry could not save her from
alcoholism, psychological problems, repr esenting only an imaginary projection of her trauma. If,
however, for the American poet, poetry did not had a good effect, nothing prevents us to believe that
for her readers this poetry will prove its cathartic power, especially since we are dealing with a poet
who simply ‘throw up’ her disease on paper.
Beyond any romantic perspective over her genius, we recognize the unusual abilities of this
neurotic diva who write a poem so unique that any other poet could not compete with. The book Anne
Sexton: A Self Portrait in Letters , which contains confe ssional letters sent by the poet to her close st
persons or to her fans, offers a panoramic image on the relationship between mental illness, suicide
and poetry. In a letter sent to the poet W. D. Snodgrass, Anne Sexton confesses that despite the disease
who corrupts her existence, what she really wants is to continue to write as only poetry can alleviate
its destructive feelings: ‘I didn’t care if I were crazy forever if I could only write well’.
Anne Sexton is that rare creature in American culture, a popular poet, a poet from which we
have great things to learn because most of her poems are about her family life, trauma s and problems.
Anne Sexton’s poetry The Play, I believe it is the one who better describes, not only her life in
particular, but life in general. The Play flows as a run -on sentence, in the very way memory returns to

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the poet. The theme of the poem is not only depression, but loneliness, and the fact that the poet is on
her own, accompanied only by her disease a nd her problems. This poem has three stanza s and as a
method of realization it is used the method of enjambment , which means a versification process which
consists in the continuation of the poetic idea in the next verse without marking it through some pause
and with the desire of highlight ing some particular words.
As she once said that all she ever wanted was a little piece of lif e, to have children and to love
them because that might put down the demons in her head, it is difficult to live a life as a woman when
you feel such loneliness, and despair. The Play begins with the poet’s statement of regret and
hopelessness of living such a hard life: ‘I am the only actor.
It is difficult for one woman
to act out a whole play.
The play is my life,
my solo act.’
Later, the poem shows how difficult is for Anne Sexton to keep living in such a world, in a world
where she feels strange, alienate with all that seems normal f or any other person except her: ‘My
running after the hands/ and never catching up./ (The hands are out of sight -/ that is, offstage.)/ All I
am doing onstage is running,/ running to keep up,/ but never making it.’ ‘The hands’ from this passage
can be interpreted as the hands of God, or Heaven as the poet said that they ‘are out of sight’, and ‘the
running’ can be translated in her several a ttempts to suicide.
Next stanza describe how she got help from doctors and give up the thought of committing
suicide (‘Suddenly I stop running./ This moves the plot along a bit.’), at least for a while, and
succeeded to put all this despair and depression into great and exquisite lines full of meaning and
importance, although she is tired and in so much pain (‘I am standing upright/ but my shadow is
crooked’).
Final stanza of The Play portrays the final parts of life suggested by the performance, which
in the poet’s eyes it was a bad one. Despite the effort to keep breathing (‘I go on to the last lines’), she
is seen as a person who struggle to live for the loved ones, but not for her; she is not happy with this
life that was given to her (‘To be without God is to be a snake/ who wants to swallow an elephant’).
Finally, ‘the curtain falls’, and the poet put s light on the fact that her performance was not an incredible
one for the fact t hat she was alone, and alone is very hard to exist and to create something that will
survive through time even after one’s death (‘It was a bad performance/ That’s because I am the only
actor’).

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Anne Sexton considers that she does not have the necessary qualities to be able to achieve by
herself success and any other powerful tools that make a human to be extraordinary and remain that
way after death. She ends her confession with a rhetorical question, that it was not made for an answer,
but to communicate an idea or an attitude, lea ving doubt and hesitation in the reader’s mind (‘and
there are few human whose lives/ will make an interesting play./ Don’t you agree?’). Will one of us
be able to make an extraordinary and interesting performance by ourselves?
Being a confessional poet, Anne Sexton writes her poetry in first person singular for a better
understanding of her thoughts, emotions and feelings, and in order to make her readers feel connected
to the lines that are expressing so much creativity embroidered with depression and illness.
The most adequate of her poems that describes such feelings is The Double Image , and as the title
may suggest the duality of a person, the good and the bad, the light and the dark, the creativity and
the depression.
The Double Image is a long poem in eight sections which offers a great example of how Anne
Sexton analyzes her madness and her identity in matters of personal relationships, in this poem with
her mother and her daughter. The p oem begins in the present tense, with the mother and her child
watching the leaves fall, and the daughter, Joyce, asking where the yellow leaves go, and receiving a
cryptically answer: ‘today believed/ in itself, or else it fell’. Then, the poet briefly d escribes her first
suicide attempt and mental hospital, this resulting from her guilt over her daughter’s first serious
illness. It is a pity of how Anne Sexton had all her struggles and desires of death because she lived in
such a vicious circle: one beca use of h er love for her children and the fact that she cannot spend more
time with them because of her depression, depression that was being caused because she was a mother
(Anne Sexton was diagnosed with post -partum depression).
The poem conti nues by creating another image, an image of the poet living with her mother
(‘Too late,/ too late, to live with your mother, the witches said’), while her own child lived elsewhere.
The image moves in continue torment between the poet and her mother: ‘I ca nnot forgive your suicide,
my mother said./ And she never could. She had done my portrait/ done instead’.
As continuing reading and trying to understand the words between the lines of Anne Sexton’s
thoughts, this poem builds a series of ‘double images’; the central image is the pair of portraits, mother
and daughter, but also the mirrors, windows, and people themselves also create this idea of a double
image. The final part of the poem returns to the present tense of the first section: ‘Now you stay for
good/ You call me mothe r and I remember my mother again,/ somewhere in greater Boston, dying’.

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IV. Conclusions

The purpose of this paper was to bring to the fore not also the poetry of femininity, the written
poetry of the 60s, that reports to personal universe, but also the great personality of Anne Sexton, one
of the most appreciated poet of her time, but not also; best known for her confessional poetry.
This study’s aims was to examine the relation between mental illness, depression poetry and
suicide, using as a case study the biography of Anne Sexton, a famous American poet. After I listed
some of the most important aspects of Anne Sexton’s life, aspects which are considered to be the
reason o why the poet had to deal with such pain and struggle in order to survive, I chose two from
the many of her poems, The Play and The Doub le Image , to show how creativity depends of her
depression in creating such lyrics with this profound charge.
From the time of Anne’s breakdown at 28 until her death at 45, poetry kept her alive. We
might say that somehow depression managed to be the fuel of the writing that transformed Anne
Sexton who never realized how beautiful she was and how she fulfill other’s lives with her lyrics, how
much she inspired others, what a contribution she made to the world.
Almost everything is reduced in Anne Sexton’s poetry to flesh, sex, blood, elements that
compose a Thanatos territory from which escaping is impossible. And it was impossible, especially
because these poet, who killed herself in 1974, has left after her a fascinating poetry.

V. Bibliography

1. Colburn, Steven. Anne Sexton: Telling the Tale , Ann Arbor: Uni versity of Michigan Press,
1988 .
2. Middlebrook, Diane Wood. Anne Sexton: A Biography . New York: Vintage, 1992.
3. Phillips. R. The Confessional Poets , Carbondale, 1973 .
4. Sexton, Anne. The Complete Poems. Boston: Houghton, 1981 .
5. Sexton, Linda Gray and Lois Ames, eds. Anne Sexton: A Self -Portrait in Letters. Boston:
Houghton Mifflin Company. 1979.