Poetry Study Anne Sexton You Dr Martin

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Anne Sexton 1928-1974 A US poet, from Massachusetts, who sadly committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. She was a lifelong manic depressive, encouraged to take up poetry as part of her therapy by her long serving therapist, Dr Martin Orne. She was successful in getting into print very early on as a writer. Her work is highly confessional, dealing with menstruation, abortion, drug taking, and even incest among other topics many consider taboo. Martin Orme was controversial in his treatment of her, using hypnosis and the spy-breaking truth serum Sodium Pentothal to crack into her subconscious, and there is evidence that many of her memories were falsely generated through leading question from Orne while in trances from such treatment. After her death it emerged that Sexton sexually abused her own daughters, though their claims are sometimes contested. One of her best poems is appropriately called and dedicated to Orne, You, Dr Martin He is described as a god over the charges of the asylum, going from having a breakfast in his rational, sane safe world to entering the madness of the wards, but still being free to leave there too. In the poem Sexton sees herself as the queen bee of her ward, Orne’s most respected patient due to her fame, but she knows her sense or regalness is illusionary for she recognizes the empty lonely dead nature of the ward and asylum too. Her meals are regimented, the diners counted in and out, all dressed in identical smocks. She is reduced to the same equal status as the other patients despite her fame and creative talents. She has no special privileges and she is uncomfortable with that. That she is honest enough to examine that in her verse actually stops her sounding spoilt or vain. She comes across as brutally honest about herself, perhaps uncomfortably so. She is assigned to making moccasins, denied access to knives, due to the danger that she will cut her own throat. She resents the shoes her hands make, wanting to use the same hands to break what she creates, knowing her creativity, her poetry, is her true work, and giving more meaning to her life. She remember once being and feeling beautiful, but she sees the rows of Moccasins she has helped create and feels that is now all that remains of her. It’ a bleak vision by a poet of great insight, trapped in a world of mundane order, mistrust of self, and conformity, where simple freedoms taken for granted no longer apply. Her envy of the Doctor’s freedom from the mess he holds her in is mixed with bitterness and some degree of self-loathing, though she respects him a great deal too. Arthur Chappell