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
I love you. You are closest to my heart, closer than any other human being. You are my extension. You are my prayer. You are my belief in God. For better or worse you inherit me.
... and my love stays bitterly glowing, spasms of it will not sleep, and I am helpless and thirsty and need shade but there is no one to cover me- not even God.
I will be steel! I will build a steel bridge over my need! I will build a bomb shelter over my heart! But my future is a secret. It is as shy as a mole.
There is an animal inside me, clutching fast to my heart, a huge crab.
Images are the heart of poetry ... You're not a poet without imagery.
Some women marry houses. It's another kind of skin; it has a heart, a mouth, a liver and bowel movements.
The windows, the starving windows that drive the trees like nails into my heart.
My heart is on a budget. It keeps me on the brink.
Look to your heart that flutters in and out like a moth. God is not indifferent to your need. You have a thousand prayers but God has one.
It was as if a morning-glory had bloomed in her throat, and all that blue and small pollen ate into my heart, violent and religious
When someone kisses someone or flushes the toilet it is my other who sits in a ball and cries. My other beats a tin drum in my heart. My other hangs up laundry as I try to sleep. My other cries and cries and cries when I put on a cocktail dress.
I brush my hair, waiting in the pain machine for my bones to get hard, for the soft, soft bones that were laid apart and were screwed together. They will knit. And the other corpse, the fractured heart, I feed it piecemeal, little chalice. I'm good to it.
Images are probably the most important part of the poem. First of all you want to tell a story, but images are what are going to shore it up and get to the heart of the matter.
There is a good look that I wear like a blood clot. I have sewn it over my left breast. I have made a vocation of it.