Anne sexton (November 9, 1928- October 4, 1974) was an American poet who found love in poetry and was known for her highly personal confessional verse. She was born as Anne Gray Harvey to her mother and father Mary Gray Staples and Ralph Churchill Harvey. Anne sexton wrote about her long battles against depression, mania, and her suicidal thoughts, she looked to help people fight personal problems and ease their pain. Sexton suffered from severe mental illness for much of her life, her first manic episode taking place in 1954. After a second episode in 1955 she met Dr. Martin Orne, who became her long-term therapist at the Glenside Hospital. It was Dr. Orne who encouraged her to take up poetry. Sextons poetic career was encouraged by a mentor …show more content…
The next year she published her first poetry book, “To Bedlam and Part Way Back”. This book encouraged her to write more and gave her national recognition. But she was failing badly on emotional side. After the sudden death of her parents, she was emotionally broke. Her married life was facing turbulence with discord and physical abuse by her husband. In 1962, Anne Sexton published her second poetry book, “All My Pretty Ones”. The book became immensely popular and following its success, she started working on four children's books with her longtime friend Maxine Cumin. In the time period between, August 22 to October 27, 1963, Sexton toured to Europe. The year 1964 saw a change in the medical history of Anne, her longtime psychiatrist moved to Philadelphia and she had to look for a new psychiatrist. The new psychiatrist placed her on drug, Thomasine, to control her depressions. Anne Sexton achieved an important distinction in 1965, when she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London. She received the esteemed Pulitzer Prize in 1967 for her highly appreciated book, “Live or Die”. She also received the Shelley Memorial Prize in the same
On August 4, 1944, Anne Frank and the other seven inhabitants living in the annex were arrested by the German Gestapo. Their secret about living in the annex was exposed by an anonymous tip, that led to their arresting. The anonymous tip also led the Gestapo to arrest two office workers that were helping the members of the annex live. The two office workers were sent to Amersfoort Camp, which was located in the Netherlands. Fortunately, one of the office helpers was released after the arrest. The other helper escaped after 6 months of being confined in the camp. As for the members of the annex, they were all transported to Camp Westerbork, located in Northeastern Netherlands. The members of the annex arrived to the camp four days after the arresting, on August 8, 1944.
Anne Frank was a young girl living in Nazi Germany from the height to the end of Hitler's reign. Anne Frank lived a short life, but she lives on through her published diary. It has been said that she has given us some of the closest insight into the troubling times the Jews faced in Germany during the 30's and 40's.
The poem starts with the statement, “a woman who loves a woman is forever young” (Sexton 1-3). These beginning lines set a common theme of eternal youthfulness and lesbian desire. In her introduction, Sexton also plays on the imagery of old versus young in her descriptions of “old breast against young breast”
This biographical information is essential to understanding Sexton's influences in writing "Cinderella" because the poem was written out of personal turmoil. The majority of Sexton's poetry is confessional style, but through her interpretation of "Cinderella", Sexton gives herself a more discrete outlet for her passions (Ostriker 255). Her biographer Diane Middlebrook notes that this poem was "a way to place her struggles in legend rather than personal history'(37)." There are two notable examples of this in "Cinderella." First, the father and step-mother are reminiscent of Sexton's own parents. In the poem the father is distant and the step mother is the cause of all of Cinderella's hardships. Anne's mother and father both struggled with alcoholism, a struggle which, according to her biographers, influenced Sexton's substance abuses later in life. Secondly, Sexton describes the way she sees herself through the stepsisters. She describes them as, "pretty enough / but with hearts like blackjacks
The name Anne Bradstreet may not be as infamous to some ears as the name Virginia Woolf or Mary Shelley, but her influence on the inclusion of women in a predominantly “male society” prevails nonetheless and reigns just as prominent as other women of her time. Anne Bradstreet was a devoted wife and mother, who was also bound by the impediments of being a Puritan woman. In fact, she summited herself to her husband and demonstrates her perpetual affection toward her children in her poem “In Reference to Her Children”. In her work “The Prologue”, Bradstreet does not request complete gender equality, but suggests women obtain acknowledgment for their work. Members of her community
Early Life 1929 the 12th of June, a child is born, and that child is Annelies ‘‘Anne’’ Marie Frank. Anne Frank is a Jewish girl who grew up during WW2 and the Holocaust. Throughout her childhood, her and her father Otto, her mother Edith, and her older sister Margot, lived generally carefree lives in the German city, Frankfurt am Main. Growing up she was raised as a liberal Jew, and her and her family typically didn’t follow all customs and traditions of Judaism, the religion that Jewish people followed. When Anne was born, the family lived in an apartment like building called Marbachweg 307, where they rented out two floors. In 1931 when Anne was around the age of three, they moved into Ganghoferstrasse 24 in a modern, liberal area called Dichterviertel. When Hitler began his reign in 1933 the Frank family had moved out of fear of their lives, and were among the 30 000 Jews who had managed to escape Germany. When the family moved to Amsterdam, Anne and Margot were immediately enrolled in school. Margot was enrolled in public school, while Anne was enrolled in a Montessori school, a type of education focused mainly on observation of the child. During her years at her Montessori school Anne showed great aptitude for writing, and her friend Hanneli Goslar even recalls Anne writing a lot when they were younger, though she never let anyone read her writing and would shield it with her hands and refuse to tell anyone about it. In 1940 when Germany invaded the Netherlands, Otto
Her Kind, a short poem written by Anne Sexton in 1960, invites readers on a dismal walk down memory lane. Sexton recalls three roles she has portrayed that seem to differ from society’s view of the average female role. Displaying abnormal qualities shoved her into living a difficult life as an outcast. Anne Sexton uses imagery, a metaphor, and symbolism to justify that women suffer from the effects of societal stereotypes.
Anne Sexton was a poet and a woman, but most importantly, she was an outcast. Subjected to nervous breakdowns and admitted to a neuropsychiatry hospital, Sexton must have been all too familiar with the staring eyes and the judging minds of the public. Just being a woman in today's world often can be enough to degrade a person in the public's eye, let alone being labeled as a crazy woman. But Anne Sexton did not let society remain unchallenged in its views. She voiced a different opinion of women through poetry. In Anne Sexton's "Her Kind" the speaker of the poem embraces society's negative stereotype of modern, liberated women and transforms it into a positive image. Two voices, the voice of
The Holocaust was the systematic persecution and murder of six million jews by the Nazi regime and the collaborators. The Franks were one of the many families who were affected by this genocide. Anne Frank was a Jewish citizen in the Netherlands during the Holocaust. Anne Frank had a lively, energetic, and rather extroverted personality, even though she was hiding from the Nazis in a small house. She showed great aptitude about reading and writing, although she did not allow others to see what she was writing about. Even through difficult times, Anne believed she would survive the war, having faith in herself, hoping to fulfill her dreams, and still trying to make the best of their solution when experiencing depression.
Poetry, a word with many connotations, which you receive is dependant solely upon who you ask; for many, poetry is merely a subject one studies in a high school English class, but for Anne Bradstreet poetry is what her life consisted of. Bradstreet was the first, published, American Poet, she was also the first female poet, extraordinary to occur during the year 1650. Bradstreet’s “superior” education, religion, family, marriage, and even deaths of loved ones were subjects of her poetry. Bradstreet left her privileged lifestyle in England for a rigorous 3-month journey to America in search of freedom from religious persecution, Anne made this trip with her husband Simon Bradstreet, a former aid of her father. In America Bradstreet started a family and led a strict Puritan life.
Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey on November 9, 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts. Her parents, Ralph Harvey and his wife, Mary Gray Staples Harvey overlooked their youngest child Anne. According to the Great Lives from History, she grew up lonely and excluded from family activities, because she was never able to reach the standards her father wanted. She felt overlooked and unwanted, and even as a child developed a reputation for doing daring and drastic things just to be noticed. Her early life was marked by episodes of rebelliousness and named by her mother as “boy-crazy” (Johnson, Sheila). After graduation, she enrolled in the Garland School and in 1948, eloped with Alfred Muller Sexton II. It was apparent that Anne suffered from serious emotional troubles when she became depressed after her second child. Although every woman in the 1950’s yearned to become a housewife and mother, Sexton found this experience shocking and devastating. She soon began psychiatric treatment with Martha Brunner-Orne and her son that “recognized Sexton’s creative potential and encouraged her to write” (Johnson, Sheila). It would soon become an outlet for Sexton’s personal problems and opinions.
The life of Anne Sexton holds many mysteries, but she wrote many hints in her poetry to help solve these mysteries. Her poetry shows a deep understanding of the life of a depressed person that most people don’t normally like to talk about. It could be very helpful to anyone who struggles with their own
The poem “Her Kind” by Anne Sexton describes different scenarios of a woman. In the poem, Anne Sexton uses three different characters to explain that she has been each of them in some way. Society places a gender role on what women are allowed to be and how they should behave, condemning the women who do not conform, trying to change them into society’s perfect view of what a woman should be. While this poem shows the author describing herself in terms of the supernatural, it ultimately shows that rebellion against societal norms for women comes at a cost, sparking judgement from a society that sees women as common housewives. Her imagery in the poem represents how she is seen as a disfigured and
Anne Bradstreet was one of the most noticeable Puritan poet. She was an educated woman and this gave her advantage to write about history, politics, religion, medicine and spirituality. She was considered to be a devoted wife, a loving mother and a very sensitive poet. She wrote poetry because she thoroughly enjoyed it and family, husband, and, children were the main subjects of her poetry. Bradstreet had her eight children between the years 1633 and 1652 (Imbarrato). Although she had loads of family responsibility, she still wrote poetry which conveyed her commitment and dedication to her work.
Every author, poet, playwright has a subtle message that they would like present to their audience. It may be a lifelong struggle that they have put into words, or a multiple page book that took a lifetime to write. A poet by the name of Anne Sexton sought out to challenge society’s views of women by writing “Her Kind”. A poet, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, Anne Sexton writes about the conflicts of a social outcast living in modern times. She voices the hardships she faces through three different speakers in her poem. At the end of the poem, the woman is not ashamed nor afraid of whom she is and is ready to die in peace. In Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”, the main idea the speaker is depicting is the multiple stereotypes placed on a woman, by society. Sexton’s vivid use of imagery paints a picture of the witch, house wife, and mother cliché, while also implying the poem is autobiographical as Sexton went through her own personal struggles during her life.