Anne Sexton No Mercy Street

Anne Sexton

No "Mercy Street" for Anne Sexton: The contemporary American confessional poet's life and works

Although women have written confessional poetry since the beginning of time, or at least since the time of Sappho, it is difficult to imagine a woman poet being able to write confessional poetry like Anne Sexton, at least in America, and reach such a wide and mainstream audience until the 1960s. The brilliant, manic-depressive, and brutally honest Sexton opened up her life and her heart to her readership, and struck a chord in the hearts of many educated and intelligent women chafing against the bonds of their conventional existences in postwar suburbia.

In Sexton's poem "45 Mercy Street," the poet wanders around Beacon Hill in Boston, an affluent area where Sexton's grandmother, according to the poet, wore a "whale-boned" corset, an image symbolizing the older woman's Victorian sexual repression. The poem's setting reflects Sexton's background as a native of Massachusetts. Sexton attended an elite boarding school and even worked as a professional fashion model because of her lanky feminine beauty ("Biography of Anne Sexton," Poem Hunter, 2008). But society's shackles of feminine identity could not fully contain the poet's soul. Wandering down "52 Mercy Street," the poet describes herself being born by a stranger's seed, as if all men are strangers to the suffering of women.

The poet's purse is filled with cigarettes and pills. "I have lost my green Ford, / my house in the suburbs, / two little kids/sucked up like pollen by the bee in me / and a husband / who has wiped off his eyes / in order not to see my inside out." Sexton's husband is blind to her suffering, and the contents of her pocketbook are filled with self-destructive implements. Motherhood provides her no comfort and the jerky sentences reflect the difficulty of thinking her ambivalent thoughts about her role as a woman within her family and in society.

Sexton's mental illness led her to poetry in a very traceable fashion. After her second nervous breakdown in 1955 her therapist encouraged her to try poetry as a source of emotional release and communication. After her first poetry workshop, Sexton's career exploded. Her poems were quickly accepted by such esteemed publications as the New Yorker. She was mentored by some of the greatest male and female poetic luminaries of her day, including W.D. Snodgrass, Maxine Kumin, and Robert Lowell. She attended Lowell's poetry workshop with her fellow female poet Sylvia Plath, who also suffered from manic depression ("Biography of Anne Sexton," Poem Hunter, 2008).

Anne Sexton's literary success did not provide her with inner peace, and like Plath as well she committed suicide by inhaling poisonous gas ("Biography of Anne Sexton," Poem Hunter, 2008). Prophetically, in Sexton's poem entitled simply "Wanting to Die," she wrote of suicides: "Still-born, they don't always die, / but dazzled, they can't forget a drug so sweet/that even children would look on and smile." However, although most of her poems can be characterized as confessional and psychologically oriented in their subject and tone, not all of them are simply anecdotes from the poet's tormented life. Sexton's willingness to talk about the complicated feelings of mothers, specifically mothers and daughters, was revolutionary for its time, and she also addressed her own issues in light of a long cultural tradition of silencing female voices, as reflected in her poems on fairy tale heroines like Briar Rose and Snow White. "Beauty is a simple passion, but, oh my friends, in the end/you will dance the fire dance in iron shoes," wrote Sexton. Her Snow White poem about is about female competition and how the young beauty supplants the old in the tale of "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs." Usually eschewing conventional rhymes and structures, Sexton uses striking images to relate her feelings to the reader in ways that still have impact today, even though her persona is no longer a cultural fixation as it was when she lived. "Let us put your three children/and my two children,/ages ranging from eleven to twenty-one,/and send them in a large air net up to God,/with many stamps, real air mail,/and huge signs attached: / SPECIAL HANDLING./DO NOT STAPLE, FOLD or MUTILATE!" she cries in "The Child Bearers," reflecting both her desire to care for her children, but also to escape the confines of a feminine life devoted to the care of others.