Live or Die

My first encounter with poetry by Anne Sexton. Sexton was a contemporary of Sylvia Plath, being only four years her senior. The two were close during the 1950s and early-1960s. In many ways their poetry overlapped significantly. This is especially true of Plath’s posthumous collection of poetry entitled “Ariel” and this volume by Sexton called “Live or Die.”

Sexton adopted a confessional free verse prose in “Live or Die,” where she described in harrowing detail her own mental state during the 1960s and the sometimes abusive relationship she had with her daughters. One poem, titled “Suicide Note,” details some of Sexton’s struggles with depression and past suicide attempts. In other poems she acknowledges her dependence on pharmacological drugs both to escape depression and to sometimes attempt suicide.

I would argue that one primary distinction between Sexton and Plath is that Plath trafficked in subtlety and Sexton has a more direct and overt message in her poetry. Although Plath and Sexton obviously suffered from similar mental anguish, the former usually couched her autobiographical explorations of the consciousness in heavy imagery and metaphor. Sexton’s verse often reminds me of Charles Bukowski’s direct, what you see is what you get, poetry that captured the darker aspects of human nature.

I would suggest reading “Ariel” by Sylvia Plath before reading “Live or Die” by Anne Sexton. I say this because a few poems in Sexton’s work imitate the style of her friend’s poetry in “Ariel.” Specifically, I saw a rhythmic harmony between “Cripples and Other Stories” by Anne Sexton and “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath. Another parallel is specific imagery in “The Stones” by Sylvia Plath (Ariel) and Sexton’s use of the phrases “mouth hole” and “stones” through “Live or Die.” Plath’s poem entitled “The Stones” details, some think, her travails in mental hospitals of the 1950s and her use of the phrase “mouth hole” was suggestive of the depraved state of affairs in insane asylums. More so the frequent use of “stones” and the imagery of stones in both Plath’s and Sexton’s poems is suggestive of something primordial or perhaps a blank slate. Readers will find that both Ariel and Live or Die make very frequent references to stones in numerous poems.

Unique to Sexton’s work, though, is the refrain of “dolls” in numerous poems. Sexton talks about playing with dolls, acting like a doll, being treated like a doll in an effort, I think, to suggest her state of mind during the 1960s of existing in an unreality.

There’s also another poem entitled “Mother and Jack and the Rain,” which begins with: “I have a room of my own.” This seems like a direct reference to Virginia Woolf’s eponymous essay “A Room of One’s Own,” which argued that it was critical for women’s creative flourishing and independence to possess rooms of their own apart from male-dominated society. Sexton turns that notion on its head, arguing that although she “has a room of her own” it is sodden with “rain”— an isolating chamber. Perhaps it is not insignificant that Woolf committed suicide by drowning in 1941; knowing that, Sexton was probably trying to acknowledge her intellectual debt to writers like Woolf but couched in her thematic emphasis on mental illness.

This is a powerful collection of poems and I can see why Live or Die won the Pulitzer Prize. It is unfortunate, though, that Plath and Sexton both suffered from chronic depression that eventually culminated in suicide. There’s even a poem in Sexton’s collection entitled “Sylvia’s Death,” meant as a sort of elegy for her friend.

At the first reading, I felt that the Live or Die was a step back from All My Pretty Ones. However, I felt that I needed to read these poems more closely and then doing so increased my appreciation. The poems here are more complex and advanced than All My Pretty Ones much like that collection advanced from To Bedlam And Half-Way Back.

One of Sexton's talents that I missed here is her ability to arrange poems in an order that illuminates the following poems, she does that best in Transformations. Since the poems are arranged in chronological order, that talent isn't used in Live or Die.

Live or Die feels a little false, the poems were not precisely written in order they appear - based on Middlebrook's biography. The book ends with Live - given Sexton's suicide - that's feels a little fake too. She never gave up talking about suicide and was hospitalized for over two weeks in the middle of the Live or Die period. The pacing of the chronological order is off too - because from May 64 to the summer of 65 she didn't write much. She went on a new drug, Thorazine, which hampered creativity in the summer of 64 and spent a lot of time working on a play.

All that was why originally I thought All My Pretty Ones was better, plus AMPO is more about the death of her parents, the relationship with her psychiatrist, and her illicit romance with James Wright which is more interesting to me than suicide.

However, the poems that are in the collection are really good: The Legend of the One Eyed Man, The Addict, Wanting to Die, Little Girl, My String Bean were my favorites. Sexton started writing purely from what she called the depth of her unconscious in this period. Overall they are stronger than what is in AMPO. Sylvia's Death is illuminating because before Plath's suicide, Sexton was the stronger poet. Perhaps it is because of the Bell Jar that Plath seems to be the larger figure now. Reading Middlebrook's biography along side the poems in this period is further illuminating.