English 122 - Dark, Brooding, Important - Anne Sexton

Maurice Quinn

Elizabeth Isenkul

English 122

April 1, 2015

Dark, Brooding, Important

Anne Sexton the poet, the drama queen, the say it as it is girl. Anne Sexton is known for her confessional poetry, using a harder, tougher way of writing than being a polite poet. She didn’t care for the conventional methods of the poets in her generation, favoring more of a darker flavor. She self-destructed, committed suicide through carbon monoxide poisoning but that did not snuff out the life of her writing. Anne Sexton was never afraid of saying it as it is, using a darker twisted world for her writing, and with that dark conversations from pen to paper, she is brought to life and light.

        Anne Sexton has numerous poems and stories, but her poetry is why she is to be revered. She was in and out of mental issues, but they say the craziest of us write the truest. That speaks more than true for Sexton, talking about her menstruation period, sex life, abortion, adultery, drugs, alcohol and many other topics the people of the 1960s and 1970s do not greatly appreciate. She let the insanity that plagued her bless her poems, her writing, her style. She doesn’t just say it as it is, she says it as it should be and will be.

        Many critics view Anne Sexton as the poet who matured over time. Starting out doing the conventional method of writing, she drank herself to misery, she drugged herself to worse and kept going, “maturing” her writing as her life became darker, even with the fame of being a poet. Brooding and dark, the way many like today’s writings. Authors like Edgar Allen Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King are all famous for their dark writings and Anne Sexton can be added to the darkness that many come to love, bringing light to their nights.

        One issue with Anne Sexton, is sometimes the controversy of her life takes priority over her writing. A women being famous for being bipolar and a poet than just being the wonderful writer she is. Anne Sexton uses strategic symbolism highlighting the dark and light points of the world around her. She uses mockery to get her readers to question things they believed, or society believed to be true. She put certain aspects of life on blast, such as what everyone believes the perfect happily ever after. Her dark side will either cause you to love her or put her writings down or write her off as just another crazy person not worth your time.

                  Anne Sexton’s harsh lifestyle contributed to the way she wrote and what she felt was worth writing about. She was not one to beat around the bush, she talked about the way she viewed the world and everything in it. One might wonder how such a person could put all her tragedies into words and have such a dark past made famous, or if she was ever at one point in time truly happy in her life. She was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, thought she had a different persona in her, and was also diagnosed with hysteria. She was given a way to truly express herself through her poems. Her darker thoughts and feelings brought to life. Her poems were more than just thoughts on a sheet of paper, they spoke of tragedies, histories, and she was willing to write the things most others only wished they could speak.