Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was troubled. Good-looking in an intense, nervy, raw-edged way, she worked briefly as a model before marrying young and quickly having two daughters. She began writing poetry at the suggestion of her therapist. I suppose posterity should thank him, but her case rather illustrates the shortcomings of poetry-as-therapy: after repeated bipolar breakdowns and progressive alcoholism, she killed herself at the age of 46 through carbon monoxide poisoning in her garage.

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are often paired as the female ur-confessional poets. This impulse is understandable. Both had long involvement with mental health systems, to put it mildly; both wrote extremely personal and revealing poetry in which the “I” seems, generally speaking, to be located within the author; and both were eventual suicides. The women were contemporaries, knew one another, and apparently discussed ways and means of accomplishing their deaths years before either of them took the final step.