SOURCE: "As If Day Had Rearranged Into Night: Suicidal Tendencies in the Poetry of Anne Sexton," in Literature and Psychology, Vol. XXXIX, No. 1&2, 1993, pp. 26-41.

In the following essay, Long explores the suicidal urge in Anne Sexton's poetry.

as if day had rearranged
 into night and bats flew in the sun. 

Was Anne Sexton's poetry primarily about the nature of the closed world of suicide? Most critics agree on the fact that Sexton definitely wrote about wanting to die, and the nature of suicide, from a very personal point of view. Many critics believe that at least some of Sexton's poetry reflects this suicidal "lust." According to Diane Hume George, there are "at least twenty poems primarily dedicated to explaining what it feels like to want, or need, to die" (Oedipus Anne 126). Kathleen Spivack, in her article "Poet and Friend" notes that "Anne was obsessed with death—one...