SOURCE: "Anne Sexton's Love Poems: The Genre and the Differences," in Modern Poetry Studies, Vol. 10, 1980, pp. 58-68.

In the following essay, Shurr discusses the composition and central motifs of Love Poems. According to Shurr, in Love Poems Sexton "merges the possibility of the ancient genre of erotic love poetry with the immediacy of modern experience."

At least half of Anne Sexton's published volumes of poetry show a tight unity of construction. Though virtually all of the poems were published separately in various periodicals, and thus each can stand by itself as a complete poem, in the collections they are brought into programmatic relation to one another. This is most obvious in Transformations, where the subjects are all known fairy tales and the speaker and the format of presentation is in every case the same. But study of Love Poems, The Death Notebooks, and The Awful Rowing Toward God...