I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor, where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind. Her Kind

Anne Sexton (1928-1974) was born in Newton, Massachusetts. She started writing poetry on the advice of her psychiatrist, Dr Martin Orne, who was treating her for depression. She published her first book of poetry, To Bedlam And Part Way Back in 1960. Her last book, Words For Dr.Y only came out after her death by suicide in 1974. She won the Pulitzer Prize in poetry in 1967 for Live Or Die.

• Self In 1958

From To Bedlam And Part Way Back (1960)

• Noon Walk On The Asylum Lawn
• Her Kind

From All My Pretty Ones (1962)

• The Starry Night
• With Mercy For The Greedy

From Love Poems (1969)

• Song For A Lady
• Just Once
• The Ballad of the Lonely Masturbator
• Your Face on the Dog's Neck

Worthy Web Links

• Plagiarist: Anne Sexton Archive (99 poems)
• The Academy of American Poets: Anne Sexton
• The Complete Works of Anne Sexton
• Anne Sexton - a photographic tribute
• Diane Middlebrook (Biographer) on Anne Sexton

"The last time I saw Mr [ Robert ] Lowell was over a year ago before he left for New York. I miss him as all apprentices miss their first real master. He is a modest man and an incisive critic. He helped me to distrust the easy musical phrase and to look for the frankness of ordinary speech. If you have enough natural energy he can show you how to chain it in. He didn't teach me what to put into a poem, but what to leave out. What he taught me was taste. Perhaps that's the only thing a poet can be taught."

(Anne Sexton on Robert Lowell)