readers who lived daily with similar kinds of fear and angst.
In 1959 Sexton unexpectedly lost both of her parents, and the memory of her difficult relationships with them--so abruptly ended--led to further
breakdowns. Poetry seemed the only route to stability, though at times the friendships she made through her art, which led to sexual affairs, also were unsettling. Her
marriage was torn by discord and physical abuse as her husband saw his formerly dependent wife become a celebrity.
In 1962 Sexton published All My Pretty Ones. So popular was her poetry in England that an edition of Selected Poems was published there as a Poetry
Fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference (1959), the Radcliff Institute Fellowship (1961), the Levinson Prize (1962), the American Academy of Arts and
Letters traveling fellowship (1963), the Shelley Memorial Prize (1967), and an invitation to give the Morris Gray reading at Harvard. To follow were a Guggenheim
Fellowship, Ford Foundation grants, honorary degrees, professorships at Colgate University and Boston University, and other distinctions.
Sexton's reputation as poet peaked with the publication of Love Poems (1969), an off-Broadway production of her play Mercy Street (1969), and the
publication of prose poems in Transformations (1972). Clearly her most feminist work, the pieces in Transformations spoke to a different kind of reader. The Sexton
voice was now less confessional and more critical of cultural practices, more inclined to look outside the poet's persona for material. In 1963 Sexton had traveled in
Europe, and in 1966 she and Kayo had gone on an African safari. In 1970 she had helped him start a business of his own after he broke associations with her
Father’s former company. Contrary to her seemingly confident public manner, however, Sexton was heavily dependent on therapists, medications, and close friends--
Particularly Maxine Kumin and, later, Lois Ames--and lovers. Continual depressive bouts, unexpected trance states, and comparatively frequent suicide attempts
kept her family and friends watchful and unnerved. Finally, in 1973, Sexton told Kayo she wanted a divorce, and from that time on a noticeable decline in her health
and stability occurred as loneliness, alcoholism, and depression took their toll.
Estranged from many of her former friends, Sexton became difficult for her maturing daughters to deal with. Aware that many of her readers did not like the
religious poetry that she had recently begun writing with her more personal themes, Sexton became nervous about her poetry. Readings had always terrified her, but
now she employed a rock group to back up her performances. She forced herself to be an entertainer, while her poems grew more and more privately sacral. In
1972 she published The Book of Folly and, in 1974, the ominously titled The Death Notebooks. Later that year, she completed The Awful Rowing toward God,
published posthumously in 1975. Divorced and living by herself, Sexton was lonely and seemed to be searching for compassion through love affairs. She continued
to be in psychotherapy, from which she evidently gained little solace. On October 4th 1974, after having lunched with Maxine Kumin, Sexton asphyxiated herself
with carbon monoxide in her garage in Boston.
Other posthumous collections of her poems include 45 Mercy Street (1976) and Words for Dr. Y: Uncollected Poems with Three Stories (1978), both
edited by Linda Gray Sexton. The publication of Sexton's work culminated in The Complete Poems in 1981. Sexton also wrote important essays about poetry and
made insightful comments in her many interviews. She understood the fictive impulse, the way the writer uses both fact and the imagination in creation; and, like
Wallace Stevens, she saw her art as the "supreme fiction," the writer's finest accomplishment. Much of what Sexton wrote was in no way autobiographical, despite
the sense of reality it had, and thus criticisms of her writing as "confessional" are misleading. She used her knowledge of the human condition--often painful, but
Sometimes joyous--to create poems readers could share. Her incisive metaphors, the unexpected rhythms of her verse, and her ability to grasp a range of meaning in
precise words have secured Sexton's good reputation. Though comparatively short, her writing career was successful, as was her art.
John Milton (1608-1674), English poet, whose rich, dense verse was a powerful influence on succeeding English poets, and whose prose was devoted to
the defense of civil and religious liberty. Milton is often considered the greatest English poet after Shakespeare.
Milton was born in London on December 9, 1608, and educated at Saint Paul's School and Christ's College, University of Cambridge. He intended to
become a clergyman in the Church of England, but growing dissatisfaction with the state of the Anglican clergy together with his own developing poetic interests led
him to abandon this purpose. From 1632 to 1638 he lived in his father's country home in Horton, Buckinghamshire, preparing himself for his poetic career by
entering upon an ambitious program of reading the Latin and Greek classics and ecclesiastical and political history. From 1638 to 1639 he toured France and Italy,
where he met the leading literary figures of the day. On his return to England, he settled in London and began writing a series of social, religious, and political tracts.
In 1642 he married Mary Powell, who left him after a few weeks because of the incompatibility of their temperaments, but was reconciled to him in 1645;
she gave birth to three daughters and a son before her death in 1652. In his writings, Milton supported the parliamentary cause in the civil war between
Parliamentarians and Royalists, and in 1649 he was appointed foreign secretary by the government of the Commonwealth. He became blind about 1652 and
Thereafter carried on his literary work helped by an assistant; with the aid also of the poet Andrew Marvell, he fulfilled his government duties until the restoration of
Charles II in 1660. In 1656 he married a second wife, who died two years later shortly after giving birth to a daughter who lived only a few months. With the
Restoration, Milton was punished for his support of Parliament by a fine and a short term of imprisonment. He married a third time in 1663 and until his death on
November 8, 1674, he lived in seclusion.
Of the poet's personality, memoirs written by Milton's contemporaries indicate that his was a singular blend of grace and sweetness and of force and severity
Amounting almost to harshness. In some of his own writing he reveals his arrogance and bitterness. Although isolated and embittered by blindness, he fulfilled the
Tasks he had set himself, lightening his dark days with music and conversation.
John Milton and Sexton where both puritan writers at heart Sexton had her ways of perceiving beauty in death and Milton with his way of thinking about Life itself. Now if we compare it to modern times we still perceive death as a way of life and how you see through the looking glass of it all . So if you look back into 17th century style of John Milton and to now not much has changed there will forever be life and death and you will look at it how you may want to see it in your eyes but to everyone its different . Anne Sexton from the 19th century wanted nothing more then to see beauty in death and happiness within her about writing it down with such careful strokes of each letter every word she formed with inner and utmost beauty.
Puritans- members of a group of Protestants in 16th- and 17th-century England and 17th-century America who believed in strict religious discipline and called for the simplification of acts of worship.
Professor: Arnie Kantrowitz Student: Dolores Tobias
ENL 350 Paper #2 April 28, 2004
Anne Sexton
The Truth the Dead Know
For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my farther, born February 1900, died June 1959
Gone, I say and walk from chruch,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
Its is June. I am tired of being brave.
We drive to the cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.
My darling, the wind falls in like a stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
We entertouch entirely. No one's alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.
And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in there stone boats. they are more like stone
than the sea would be stopped. they refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.
John Milton
Here lieth one who did most truly prove,
That he could never die while he could move,
So hung his destiny never to rot
While he might still jogg on, and keep his trot,
Made of never to decay
Untill his revolution was at stay.
yet (without a crime
'Gainst old truth) motion number'd out his time;
And like an mov'd with wheel and waight,
His being ceast, he ended strait,
Rest that gives all men life, gave him his death,
And too much breathing put him out of breath,
Nor were it contradiction to affirm
Too long vacation hastned on .
Meerly to drive the time away he sickn'd,
Fainted, and died, nor would with Ale be ;
Nay, quoth he, on his swooning bed outstretch'd,
If I may not sure Ile ne're be fetch'd,
But vow though the all stood hearers,
For one Carrier put down to make six .
Ease was his chief disease, and to judge right,
He di'd for that his Cart went light,
His leasure told him that his time was com,
And lack of load, made his life burdensom,
That even to his last breath (ther be that say't)
As he were he cry'd more waight;
But had his doings lasted as they were,
He had bin an immortall Carrier.
he spent his date
In cours reciprocal, and had his fate
Linkt to the mutual flowing of the Seas,
Yet (strange to think) his was his increase:
His Letters are deliver'd all and gon,
Onely remains this .
Professor: Arnie Kantrowitz Student: Dolores Tobias
ENL 350 Paper #2 April 28, 2004
Work Cited
http://www.pages/prodigy.net/stesha/annesexton.html
http://www.empirezine.com/spotlight/sexton/sex1.html
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/jmilton.html
