[By] the end [of Sexton's career her] work had deteriorated badly. But long before, the faults had been advertised, and like most advertisements the statements were only half true. The labels ("confessional") and the adjectives ("ostentatious") had come so early and had remained so permanently that no one really noticed when they didn't apply. The final, sprawling, entirely personal poems appeared like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Yet one has only to look at those first five books, and in particular Transformations, which is really a tour de force, to realize how much of her work did not fall into the handy Sexton categories and that where she ended up was not where she had begun.

Sexton began in fact as a formalist, and rhyme and meter, the usual equipment of form, were an integral part of the early poems. In an early review of Sexton's work (Poetry, Feb., 1961), James...