Anne Sexton’s Awful Rowing Toward Self-annihilation

                         © Rollie McKenna

Anne Sexton loved applause and hated herself. The cloak of confessional poetry was wrapped about this personality skeleton not just for Anne Sexton, but also for many of her contemporaries. Among Sexton’s published collections are To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), Live or Die (1966), and The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975).

This 1961 portrait of Sexton, by photographer Rollie McKenna, is on view at the National Portrait Gallery, in the recently opened exhibition “Women of Our Time: Twentieth Century Photographs.”   

The confessional movement arrived in the mid-1950s and in its number we count some of the great voices of the twentieth century—Sylvia Plath, Robert Lowell, W. D. Snodgrass, and Anne Sexton. Called “confessional” because the movement emphasized cathartic discourse, Sexton and Plath placed their fragile emotional conditions on the block from the beginning, and in their respective words there seemed to exist a race conducted to see who could die first. When Plath finally succumbed to stove gas in February of 1963, Sexton wrote:

(Sylvia, Sylvia
where did you go
after you wrote me
from Devonshire
about raising potatoes
and keeping bees?)
what did you stand by,
just how did you lie down into?
Thief!—
how did you crawl into,
crawl down into,
crawl down alone
into the death I wanted so badly and for so long…

In Oedipus Anne, Diane Hume-George writes, “I feel I am overhearing a pathetic competition between suicides, one accomplished and one potential, full of petty jealousy and masquerading as an eulogy.” This quest to share in death is part of the confessional element here; however, there is also a cry for attention. Adds Hume-George, “Although Sylvia’s Death is ostensibly ‘for Sylvia Plath’ it might have been more accurately dedicated ‘for myself on the occasion of Sylvia’s death.’”

Sexton would affirm her commitment to life occasionally, as in her 1966 poem Live, where she states flatly:

The poison just didn’t take
So I won’t hang around in my hospital shift,
Repeating The Black Mass and all of it.
I say Live, Live because of the sun,
The dream, the excitable gift.

These lighter moods would not last in her words, and eventually pleas for attention and themes of desperation would permeate her works. Maxine Kumin writes, “Anne basked in the attention she attracted, partly because it was antithetical to an earlier generation’s view of the woman writer as poetess and partly because she was flattered by and enjoyed the adoration of her public.” Reacting to a childhood wherein she felt rejected and unwanted, Sexton was, Kumin notes, the “intensely private individual” who “bared her liver to the eagle in public readings where almost invariably there was standing room only.”

Anne Sexton equaled Sylvia Plath in death in 1974 when she was able to coax enough carbon monoxide into her system to complete the task at which Sylvia Plath had previously succeeded.  Sexton’s poetry is monumental in its visceral and passionate exploration of the modern American feminine psyche; it is tragic because its central themes are tied to the destruction of its creator.

Listen to Anne Sexton's poems Silvia’s Death, Just Once, and Said The Poet To The Analyst as read by Jennifer Sichel, a researcher at NPG

For Further Reading:
Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems (Houghton Mifflin, 1981).
Diane Hume-George, Oedipus Anne (University of Illinois Press, 1987).

Anne Sexton/Rollie McKenna, 1961/Silver gelatin print/National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Rollie McKenna / © 1961 Rollie McKenna