★★★★☆ Madness and first-person pronouns

Live or Die: Poems

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath are famous as founders of the Confessional Poetry movement of the mid-twentieth century. Plath began writing poetry in the 1950s and wrote until her suicide in 1963. That was not her first suicide attempt, only the first successful one. Sexton was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1955 to be treated for what we now call bipolar disorder. There one of her doctors encouraged her to write poetry to battle her melancholia. In 1974 she, too, committed suicide. Like Plath's, her successful suicide was preceded by several unsuccessful attempts. One certainly gets the impression that "Confessional Poet" is a terribly hazardous career choice. (Yeah, yeah, correlation is not causation...)

For a poetry writing class, I am required to read poems by Sexton and Plath. Live or Die is perhaps Sexton's most celebrated book -- it won a Pulitzer Prize -- so I chose to read it.

You will not be surprised to learn that many of the poems concern madness and suicide. The poems are in order of the date of composition. I, alas, found the first half very hard going, not because it was sad -- I expected that. No, the problem was that I had a lot of trouble understanding the poems. After that the fog lifted a bit. I can pinpoint the exact place that happened. It was the poem "Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman" which, you will not be surprised to hear, is addressed to one of her daughters. The next poem, "A Little Uncomplicated Hymn" addressed to her daughter Joy, is powerful. It is not, in fact, uncomplicated.

In the naming of you I named
all things you are …
except the ditch
where I left you once,
like an old root that wouldn’t take hold,
that ditch where I left you
while I sailed off in madness

That is a complication, indeed!

The best of the poems in Live or Die are very good. It is possible that all the poems are equally good, even those beyond my comprehension, but that I can't judge.

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