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Anne Sexton was a confessional poet; that is, she wrote poetry out of the most intimate and painful details of her life. To a certain extent every poet does this, but few have done so with the frankness and audacity of this one. Sexton presented the truth about herself, her experiences, and her psychic life in the starkest possible terms. She was strongly influenced by other confessional poets, including Robert Lowell and, in particular, W. D. Snodgrass; her friends Sylvia Plath, Maxine Kumin, and George Starbuck also played a part in her poetic development. Sexton's subject matter was often related to her mental therapy, for she was continuously under the care of a psychiatrist and was several times treated in mental institutions. Hence her poems—which in fact began as therapy —are often attempts to deal with the guilt, fear, and anxiety that were the legacy of her childhood. If the poems sometimes seem like one long psychiatric case history, they nevertheless document in a remarkable fashion the growth of a gifted and tortured sensibility, and readers undaunted by intimacy and intensity in poetry will find in Sexton's work an extraordinary aesthetic experience.
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