Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton
Anne Sextonwas an American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967 for her book Live or Die. Themes of her poetry include her long battle against depression and mania, suicidal tendencies, and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPoet
Date of Birth9 November 1928
CityNewton, MA
CountryUnited States of America
The Saints come, as human as a mouth, with a bag of God in their backs, like a hunchback, they come, they come marching in.
Blind with love, my daughter has cried nightly for horses, those long-necked marchers and churners that she has mastered, any and all, reigning them in like a circus hand....
I was only sitting here in my white study with the awful black words pushing me around.
I tell it stories now and then and feed it images like honey. I will not speculate today with poems that think they're money.
I am not lazy. I am on the amphetamine of the soul. I am, each day, typing out the God my typewriter believes in.
Now that I have written many words, and let out so many loves, for so many, and been altogether what I always was a woman of excess, of zeal and greed, I find the effort useless.
What's missing is the eyeballs in each of us, but it doesn't matter because you've got the bucks, the bucks, the bucks.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars. Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die.
The stars are pears that no one can reach, even for a wedding. Perhaps for a death.
To die whole, riddled with nothing but desire for it, is like breakfast after love.
With this pen I take in hand my selves and with these dead disciples I will grapple. Though rain curses the window let the poem be made.
My business is words. Words are like labels, or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
Please God, we're all right here. Please leave us alone. Don't send death in his fat red suit and his ho-ho baritone.
I said, the poets are there I hear them singing and lying around their round table and around me still.