SEXTON, ANNE

born Nov. 9, 1928, Newton, Mass., U.S. died Oct. 4, 1974, Weston, Mass. ne Anne Harvey American poet whose work is noted for its confessional intensity. Anne Harvey attended Garland Junior College for a year before her marriage in 1948 to Alfred M. Sexton II. She studied with the poet Robert Lowell at Boston University and also worked as a model and a librarian. Although she had written some poetry in childhood, it was not until the later 1950s that she began to write seriously. Her poems, which showed Lowell's influence, appeared in Harper's, The New Yorker, Partisan Review, and other periodicals, and her first book, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960. The book won immediate attention because of the intensely personal and relentlessly honest self-revelatory nature of the poems recording her nervous breakdown and recovery. Their imagery was frequently brilliant, and their tone was both sardonic and vulnerable.Her second book of poems, All My Pretty Ones (1962), continued in the vein of uncompromising self-exploration. Live or Die (1966), a further record of emotional illness, won a Pulitzer Prize and was followed by, among others, Love Poems (1969), Transformations (1971), The Book of Folly (1972), and The Death Notebooks (1974). The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975) and 45 Mercy Street (1976, edited by her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton) were published posthumously.Sexton taught at Boston University in 197071 and at Colgate University in 197172. She also wrote a number of children's books with poet Maxine Kumin, including Eggs of Things (1963), Joey and the Birthday Present (1971), and The Wizard's Tears (1975). She died by her own hand.