Mercy Street

Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was a Pulitzer Prize–winning American poet born in Newton, Massachusetts. She attended Garland Junior College for one year and briefly worked as a model. She married Alfred Muller Sexton II at age nineteen, and in 1953 gave birth to a daughter. Shortly after, she was diagnosed with postpartum depression. When Sexton attempted suicide after the birth of her second daughter, her doctor encouraged her to pursue her interest in writing poetry, and in the fall of 1957, she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education.   Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other Confessional poets, Sexton offers the reader an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. The experience of being a woman was a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for bringing subjects such as menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction into her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy over her subject matter. Sexton’s poetry collections include To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones, Transformations, and Live or Die, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. In 1974 at the age of forty-six, Sexton lost her battle with mental illness and committed suicide.