SOURCE: "Mysticism and Suicide: Anne Sexton's Last Poetry," in Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol. 68, No. 3, Fall, 1985, pp. 335-56.

In the following essay, Shurr discusses the significance of Sexton's increasing religiosity and impending suicide revealed in The Awful Rowing Toward God.

Schweigen. Wer inniger schwieg rührt an die Wurzeln der Rede.

—Rilke

And Rilke, think of Rilke with his terrible pain.

—Anne Sexton

When Anne Sexton died in 1974, she had just produced what she intended to be her final book of poems. The Awful Rowing Toward God. Before that volume the direction of her work was unclear. There had been seven earlier books of poetry, beginning with the forceful and unsettling poems of To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960). Her signature was the clear line of personal narrative; but it was frequently not clear whether the narratives were true biography or a kind of artistically manipulated pseudo-biography. She...