Literary Birthday – 9 November – Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was born 9 November 1928 and died 4 October 1974.

Anne Sexton: Nine Remarkable Quotes

1. The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even than after sex, and that’s saying a lot.
2. Live or die. But don’t poison everything.
3. God owns heaven but He craves the earth.
4. Writers are such phonies: they sometimes have wise insights but they don’t live by them at all. That’s what writers are like…you think they know something, but usually they are just messes.
5. I like you; your eyes are full of language.
6. Put your ear down close to your soul and listen hard.
7. Those moments before a poem comes, when the heightened awareness comes over you, and you realize a poem is buried there somewhere, you prepare yourself. I run around, you know, kind of skipping around the house, marvellous elation. It’s as though I could fly.
8. Poetry is my life, my postmark, my hands, my kitchen, my face.
9. Even so, I must admire your skill. You are so gracefully insane.

Anne Sexton was an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Live or Die in 1967. Themes in her poetry included her suicidal tendencies, her depression, and intimate details of her private life. She also wrote four children’s books with Maxine Kumin. Sexton began working as a model, and then worked as a teacher, a lecturer of writing, eventually becoming a professor of creative writing.

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by Amanda Patterson

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