It’s the birthday of the Confessional poet Anne Sexton (1928-1974, #diedtooyoung), who began writing poetry seriously as a way to cope with mental illness and who became one of America’s most respected poets, winning the Pulitzer in 1967 for her volume, Live or Die.

Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, and had an unhappy (and possibly abusive) childhood. After boarding school, she attended one year of junior college before eloping with Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II, but her husband was gone a lot (serving in Korea, for one thing), and Anne was unfaithful and eventually entered therapy. She struggled with postpartum depression after the birth of each of their two daughters and began having breakdowns and getting institutionalized. One psychiatrist advised her to write poetry, which she’d been interested in since high school. She studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University, and her first volume of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, came out in 1960 to critical acclaim. (Love that title.) Her poetry was deeply intimate and painfully honest about her experiences with “madness” and cures and her obsession with death. Her second volume was All My Pretty ones (1962) and also met with critical acclaim; several more volumes followed, including Live or Die, The Death Notebooks (1974), and a play, Mercy Street (1972). She received numerous awards, fellowships (including a Guggenheim), and honorary doctorates.

Sexton’s marriage fell apart; in addition to mental illness, she struggled with alcoholism and constantly sought love via affairs. When she was nearly 46 years old, Sexton killed herself by asphyxiation, sitting in an idling car in her garage. Sexton’s fellow poet and close friend Maxine Kumin claimed that poetry is what “enabled [Sexton] to endure life for as long as she did” (https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/anne-sexton).

Sexton’s poem “The Starry Night” begins:

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of – shall I say the word – religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars. – Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist

except where one black-haired tree slips

up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.

The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.

O starry night! This is how

I want to die.

(Read the whole thing here.)

Be well and be loved on this still, gray Friday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.