SOURCE: "Seeking the Exit or the Home: Poetry and Salvation in the Career of Anne Sexton," in Shakespeare's Sisters: Feminist Essays on Women Poets, edited by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Indiana University Press, 1979, pp. 261-8.

In the following essay, Juhasz explores Sexton's creative urge as both a curse and cathartic force in her life. Juhasz maintains that Sexton's dual identity as housewife and poet proved a source of inspiration and despair.

If you are brought up to be a proper little girl in Boston, a little wild and boycrazy, a little less of a student and more of a flirt, and you run away from home to elope and become a proper Boston bride, a little given to extravagance and a little less to casseroles, but a proper bride nonetheless who turns into a proper housewife and mother, and if all along you know that there...