Anne Sexton's Recorded Therapy: Commentary on Skorczewski

I don't think genius and insanity grow in the same bed…. I think the artist must have a heightened awareness. It is only seldom that this sprouts from mental illness alone.

I used to describe [writing poetry] like this; that if you used form it was like letting a lot of wild animals out of the arena, but enclosing them in a cage, and you could let some extraordinary animals out if you had the right cage, and that cage would be the form.

“I' who reportedly write so truthfully about myself, so openly, am not that open,” wrote Anne Sexton about keeping a journal for the Teachers and Writers Collaborative in 1967. Despite her reputation for prying open her family album and writing about addictions, divorce, adultery, and the myths encrypted in what she described as the Gothic New England family romance, Sexton winced at descriptions that cast her as a confessional poet. “I'm often being personal,” she explained to her students at Colgate, “but I'm not being personal about myself,” suggesting with characteristic irony and prescience that the personal is already a plural condition.

Sexton was often described by critics as “primitive,” and criticized for using poetry to act out her personal problems, her “small wounds,” resorting to what the critic Robert Boyers (1974) described as “excessive self-dramatization, even spilling into undertones of self-pity” (p. 207). James Dickey criticized her for dwelling “on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience” (quoted in Ostriker 1988, p. 264), and her teacher John Holmes warned against bringing readers “too close to home” by offering them lyrics about abortion, menopause, female sexuality, and the anguish