Anne Sexton's is, indeed, a poetic voice that seems, even when most intense, to lack heart. The falsification of feeling that is a prominent feature of her poems, including the most celebrated among them, emerges more often than not in the form of contrived metaphor, exercises in compression that are at once agile and empty of resonance. One of her most famous poems, called "Live" (1966), is as good a case in point as any, an "affirmation" that has more to do with eliciting approval, a skill at which she was adept when she wished to be, than with any profound realization of life's value:

       So I won't hang around in my hospital shift,
       repeating the Black Mass and all of it.
       I say Live, Live because of the sun,
       the dream, the excitable gift.

There were, to be sure, instances when emotional integrity triumphed, notably when her eye...