Excerpted from Diane Wood Middlebrook, Anne Sexton: A Biography (Houghton Mifflin, 1991), Chapter 14 (pp. 272‒274).
In such poems as “Flee on Your Donkey,” “Consorting with Angels,” “Wanting to Die,” and “The Addict,” Sexton had begun to take great pains over poetry as a spoken art. Increasingly, the medium she worked in was the voice, and she strove to transfer feeling into word association as her fingers played over the typewriter keys, setting words to emotional rhythms (as she had indicated in her remarks to the NET interviewers a year earlier about her practice of writing to music). The result was in effect a monologue. What nonplussed poetry reviewers when they encountered it between the covers of a book might not have surprised them in a published script for performance, with voice cues and pauses added.
Sexton's own performance was the intended vehicle of this art. On stage she projected a commanding, confident, glamorous physical presence; from her husky voice issued a hint of vulnerability, reinforced throughout the reading by rehearsed breaks and catches. Repeated showings of the NET film on public television that year (“Channel 2 is rerunning me like an advertisement,” she said) expanded the audience for these performances, and fame itself drew letters from would-be poets. Among the most amusing letters Sexton kept was a request from the celebrity lawyer Melvin Belli, who enclosed two poems he had typed himself (apologizing for typos) and requested comments. “I can only appreciate your poems, I cannot possibly criticize them” was her usual gracious reply.
Readers, who encountered Sexton only on the page, had to supply the voice themselves. The peculiar power of the lyric poem has always been its ability to enlist a reader's empathic identification; Sexton understood this very well, and it helped focus her as an artist. As she told Anne Wilder, “I get letters daily from the so-called ‘transference’ feelings of readers. . . they all think of me as ‘well,’ as having ‘solved’ what I wrote about. Ha! So I know all about being on a so-called pedestal. A fake one that the reader creates (perhaps to separate them from the actual suffering of the writing) or else to reassure themselves about such suffering that they themselves have.”
Many of Sexton's feaders identified with her mental illness. She particularly treasured a letter from a psychiatrist who told her, “Your poems I find unusually paleological, even physiological. [. . .] Understanding the language of psychiatric patients, or of anyone, for that matter, is advanced by sympathy, I think, more than any acumen for recognition of the mot juste or the bon mot.” People who were in treatment themselves, or who had been, or who were close to others in treatment, drew encouragement from her candid representations of their very common condition. Her talent as a storyteller and her courage in acknowledging what could happen to ordinary people had drawn such readers in the past, and the publicity surrounding her Pulitzer Prize caught the attention of more.
But Sexton's audiences were not limited to those who identified one way or another with “illness” in her work. Her poetry is imbued with the era of her coming-of-age as a wife and mother, under the Eisenhower presidency and the ambience of conformity it shed: gray flannel for men and compulsory domesticity for women, the cold war, nuclear politics. Sexton's work offered the mental hospital as a metaphorical space in which to articulate the crazy-making pressures of middle-class life, particularly for women. The home, the mental hospital, the body: These are woman's places in the social order that apportions different roles to the sexes; and woman herself is the very scene of mutilation, according to the theory of penis envy, which had great currency in Sexton's milieu. Yet as Sexton put it in her challenging poem to John Holmes, this “woman's space” is not restricted to women, for
sometimes in private, my kitchen, your kitchen, my face, your face.
Sexton's poetry, in forcing discipline upon madness, fed opposite types of cultural appetite: for truth about the feel of illness, and for somewhat more disturbing truth about shifting ground between the sexes. She accomplished this goal by entrusting her voice to the understanding of the ideal listener–a space of understanding where a woman's version of things could get a new kind of hearing.