Anne Sexton, was born Anne Harvey in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She married Alfred Sexton at age nineteen. She enrolled in a modeling course at the Hart Agency and lived in San Francisco and Baltimore. In 1953 she gave birth to a daughter, but suffered postpartum depression, and was admitted to the hospital to which she would repeatedly return. In 1955, following the birth of her second daughter, Sexton suffered another breakdown and was hospitalized again; her children were sent to live with her husband’s parents. That same year she attempted suicide.

She was encouraged by her doctor to write poetry and in 1957 she enrolled in a poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education. In her introduction to Sexton’s Complete Poems the poet Maxine Kumin, her close friend, states that poetry writing gave Sexton a purpose that enabled her to cope better with life. In 1974 at the age of 46, despite a successful writing career—she won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for Live or Die—she committed suicide.

Like Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, W. D. Snodgrass (who exerted a great influence on her work), and other ‘Confessional’ poets, Sexton presents an intimate view of the emotional anguish that characterized her life. She made the experience of being a woman a central issue in her poetry, and though she endured criticism for dealing with menstruation, abortion, and drug addiction in her work, her skill as a poet transcended the controversy.