American poet who came to writing in her late twenties on the recommendation of her psychiatrist, after a postpartum breakdown and a suicide attempt, and who in less than two decades produced eight books and a Pulitzer Prize before her own suicide in 1974. Sexton studied with Lowell at Boston University in 1958–1959; Plath was in the same seminar; the three of them, with Berryman, became the central figures of what came to be called the confessional school.
The early books — To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960), All My Pretty Ones (1962), Live or Die (1966, Pulitzer) — drew directly on her hospitalizations, her relationship to her parents, her difficulties as a mother, her abortions, her body, and her sex life, in a register that was unusual for the time in its directness and unusual at any time in its formal control. Transformations (1971), Sexton's reworking of seventeen Grimm fairy tales, is among her most original books and the one her late readers have tended to elevate.
The late religious work — The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975, posthumous), and the unfinished Words for Dr. Y. — records a search for a personal God that did not arrive in time. Sexton's reception suffered for some decades from the assumption that confessional poetry was inherently exhibitionistic; the recovery of her work since the 1990s has tended to emphasize its formal intelligence and its place in the feminist reading of the female lyric.