Anne SextonA Life of Drama, Joy, and Poetry

Anne Sexton was an excellent poet; she was both inspirational and brutally honest. Sexton's poems present a true sense of the world, not the sugar- coated version usually heard. She touched on subjects that were considered to be taboo in her era; everything from incest to masturbation. Sexton was born in 1928. She grew up in a conventional middle- class family, in Massachusetts. Sexton married in her teens and worked as a fashion model. She had her first child at the age of twenty five, and it wasn't until after her second child two years later she began to write. All the while, she had huge fights with her mother and dealt with the guilt of being a mother herself. Sexton had a love/hate relationship with her mother. She resented her mother for so many things and constantly felt like a disappointment to her. Sexton's early experiences with guilt and unhealthy relationships eventually turn around with her discovery of poetry, but her writing only prolonged her eventual suicide.

(George 308)

Sexton's life was filled with extremely difficult experiences. Anne Sexton was an extraordinary woman. At the age of only seventeen Anne Sexton became a wife, a beginning writer, and a model. Sexton grew up in an extremely strict home. Her parents were high class and their children were expected to act as such. From the beginning Sexton's parents knew she was going to be different, and in their mind different was not acceptable. Sexton was forced into marriage. She needed to be free, from the pressures of "high society," and free of high expectations. Quite a few years after she married, they had their first child, Joyce. Sexton saw Joyce more as a burden than a blessing. She already had so much going on with her family issues and she...