Blevins is a writer and poet who has taught at Hollins University, Sweet Briar College, and in the Virginia Community College System. She is the author of The Man Who Went Out for Cigarettes, a chapbook of poems, and has published poems, essays, and stories in many journals, magazines, and anthologies. In this essay, Blevins argues that "Courage" "suffers from a number of significant flaws."

"Courage" is among the thirty-nine poems in the last book Anne Sexton wrote, The Awful Rowing Toward God . According to Diane Middlebrook's interesting and controversial biography of Sexton, Anne Sexton: A Biography, Sexton wrote the poems in this collection in less than a month. Middlebrook suggests that Sexton "knew the work was still fairly raw" after she finished it. She showed the manuscript to Maxine Kumin, George Starbuck, James Wright, and other friends and poets whose opinions she valued. Wright (quoted in...