In the following essay, Middlebrook examines Sexton's artistic development from suburban mother to celebrated poet, focusing on the significance of her literary mentors, particularly her relationship with John Holmes.

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

In the following essay, Long explores the suicidal urge in Anne Sexton's poetry.

In the following essay, Long examines Sexton's preoccupation with death and suicide as an integral feature of her writing. According to Long, "Her poems clearly reflect her understanding of, and attempt to come to terms with, her mental illness and suicidal behavior."

In the following essay, George examines the significance of forbidden knowledge, incest, and psychic guilt in Sexton's poetry. George contends that Sexton's truth-seeking resembles that of the mythical Oedipus of Greek tragedy and psychoanalytic theory.

In the following essay, George explores the psychoanalytic significance of infant feeding, nurturance, and excretion in Sexton's poetry, especially as evident in O Ye Tongues. According to George, "In her version of the emergence of poetic consciousness, the infant's ambivalent attachment to feces becomes a metaphor for fertilization of the imagination and for the creation of a sustaining self."

In the following essay, Middlebrook discusses Sexton's friendship with James Wright and the composition The Awful Rowing Toward God.

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."

In the following essay, Hankins explores Sexton's response to patriarchal oppression and search for feminine identity in her portrayal of the female body. According to Hankins, "Her body poetry represents her journey to herself, for in accepting and learning to love her body, she is accepting and learning herself."

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.

[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 fi...

[Anne Sexton] has described herself as "a primitive," yet is master of intricate formal techniques. Her voice has steadily evolved and varied and, at times, sought to escape speaking of the self, but her strongest poems consistently return to her narrow thematic range and the open voice of familiar feelings…. For the source of her first fame is still the focus of her work: she is the most persistent and daring of the confessionalists. Her peers have their covers: Lowell's allusiv...

In her poetry, Anne Sexton plunges into the abyss and touches the source of regeneration. In the first 3 volumes, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones and Live or Die, she explores the depths of her own consciousness. In the later three books, Love Poems, Transformations and The Book of Folly, she experiments with various mythopoeia providing possibilities of rebirth. The movement of Sexton's poetic is dual: centripetal as well as centrifugal. The inturning Therapeutic mode analyzes the &#...

After her death Anne Sexton's poetry continues to push against the boundaries of loss, to embody the daily nature of a despair that is as quiet as a lit fuse. Imminent explosion, the air tense before a storm—this is the energy of her last poems: a sensibility leaning over the edge of control, knowing that loss is final and inevitable. Sexton's poems have always come from the frontiers of the personal. In fact, her work scouted vast unknown regions of emotion for poetry and brought back ...

[Anne Sexton's] "self-portrait in letters" is very powerful publicity. There is something to be learned from it about the American poetry scene over the past twenty years; though just what may be learned from contemplating the life of Anne Sexton isn't quite so clear. To read [the letters collected in Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters] one must banish complicated thoughts about the appropriateness of peering into privacies, secrets, intimacies. Anne Sexton was never loath t...

To mourn the woman [Anne Sexton] by telling less than the truth about the poet is to perform no service. She was, let it be said, a flawed poet who became more deeply flawed, as she made of her worst tricks a trade. I did not follow her career attentively. In a life filled with books to read and things to do, one may be excused for giving second place to a poetry that dwells irritably on the squalor of the everyday, without abatement or relief. Did no one acquaint this poet with Arnold's famous words...

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 elicitin...

Mrs. Sexton's body of work evinces a definite progress in personalization. This progress made a giant leap when, in 1971, appeared Transformations, a rich collection of seventeen long poems. Each begins with a contemporary observation or application of the "moral" of some fairy tale, then segues into a contemporary recasting of the fairy tale itself. These "transformations" of Grimm's tales into grim parables for our time are deftly done, and in them Mrs. Sexton con...