Year 12 IB Extended Essays 2017

father, who “bit [her] pretty red heart in two”, following with the blame of the narrator’s suicide

due to her father’s death as she was trying to ‘get back’ to him.

Anne Sexton

Anne Sexton was habitually arraigned for her self-revelation, famous for showcasing the “dark

side of middle-class domesticity” (Pollitt, 1991). Similar to Plath, Sexton grew up in

Massachusetts and was born in 1928 (Wagner-Martin, 2017). Sexton who suffered a traumatic

childhood, felt that her parents were hostile to her, and feared possible abandonment from

them, leading her to take solace in her ‘Nana’, her maiden great-aunt (Wagner-Martin, 2017).

Her personal tragedy and experiences leaked into her works, giving us insight into her life,

marriage and health. Anne Sexton’s health was a primary concept and thematic concern in her

poems after several and frequent suicide attempts over the course of her life, before she

asphyxiated herself with carbon monoxide in her garage in Boston (Wagner-Martin, 2017).

Her naked and confronting poems insightfully bring attention, and light, to massive and deep

social and personal issues, making Anne Sexton a noted, confessional poet.

One of Sexton’s most popular poems, Again and Again and Again 4 (1960), encroaches upon

the reader the confronting issue of a recurrent burden, eating away at one. The figurative

meaning of the poem, stresses that no matter how hard one tries, it keeps coming back - again

and again. The ‘it’, in the case of this poem, is Sexton’s depression. Although the speaker is a

heartbroken woman, it can easily be switched with Anne Sexton herself, as she suffered from

depression her entire life. Recurring spurs of memory appear throughout her work, like the

death of her ‘Nana’, followed by the death of both her parents, the decline of her marriage and

constant fear of showcasing her work publically; meant Sexton was never clear of the

depressing thoughts. The poem talks of the heartbroken woman hidden behind the depression,

calling it “a mask, I try on”. However, although the woman talks of the depression hiding the