Happy Birthday, Anne Sexton! | Poems Rethabile Likes
🎂 Happy Birthday, Anne Sexton!
Poet • Pulitzer Prize winner • Confessional pioneer • born 9 November 1928
Today we celebrate the birthday of Anne Sexton — an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967 for Live or Die, and her poetry often drew on her experiences with mental illness, including bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation, as well as aspects of her personal life. Major themes include the religious quest, the transformation and dismantling of myth, the meanings of gender, inheritance and legacy, the search for fathers, mother-daughter relationships, sexual anxiety, madness and suicide, and issues of female identity. Here is her wry, searching "The Poet of Ignorance."
The Poet of Ignorance
Perhaps the earth is floating,
I do not know.
Perhaps the stars are little paper cutups
made by some giant scissors,
I do not know.
Perhaps the moon is a frozen tear,
I do not know.
Perhaps God is only a deep voice
heard by the deaf,
I do not know.
Perhaps I am no one.
True, I have a body
and I cannot escape from it.
I would like to fly out of my head,
but that is out of the question.
It is written on the tablet of destiny
that I am stuck here in this human form.
That being the case
I would like to call attention to my problem.
There is an animal inside me,
clutching fast to my heart,
a huge crab.
The doctors of Boston
have thrown up their hands.
They have tried scalpels,
needles, poison gasses and the like.
The crab remains.
It is a great weight.
I try to forget it, go about my business,
cook the broccoli, open the shut books,
brush my teeth and tie my shoes.
I have tried prayer
but as I pray the crab grips harder
and the pain enlarges.
I had a dream once,
perhaps it was a dream,
that the crab was my ignorance of God.
But who am I to believe in dreams?
Anne Sexton (1928–1974) was an American poet known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967 for Live or Die. Her poetry often drew on her experiences with mental illness, including bipolar disorder and suicidal ideation, as well as aspects of her personal life. Her early work was preoccupied with form and technique — she could write in tightly constrained metrical forms — while her middle and late work turned increasingly to free verse. She is remembered for her gift for unique imagery, often centering on the body or the household.
Read more: Poetry Foundation • ThriftBooks
Read more: Poetry Foundation • ThriftBooks
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