"I don't read poetry, but I read Anne Sexton."
            -- A fan, 1985

ANNE SEXTON LIKED to arrive about ten minutes late for her own performances: let the crowd work up a little anticipation. She would saunter to the podium, light a cigarette, kick off her shoes, and in a throaty voice say, "I'm going to read a poem that tells you what kind of a poet I am, what kind of a woman I am, so if you don't like it you can leave." Then she would launch into her signature poem, "Her Kind": "I have gone out, a possessed witch ... A woman like that is misunderstood ... I have been her kind."

What kind of woman was she? Spirited, good-looking: tall and lean as a fashion model; a suburban housewife who called herself Ms. Dog; a daughter, a mother; a New England WASP; like Emily Dickinson, "half-crack'd." And what kind of poet? Intimate; confessional; comic; insistently, disruptively female; a word wizard; a performance artist; a crowd pleaser. Those were some of the things you could learn during her first fifteen minutes onstage.

Some people didn't like the Sexton persona. But behind it stood a serious, disciplined artist whose work had been admired from the beginning by distinguished peers. During her eighteen years as a writer, Sexton earned most of the important awards available to American poets. She published eight books of poetry (leaving others in manuscript), and she saw her play Mercy Street produced off-Broadway. She was a shrewd businesswoman, and she became a successful teacher; though skimpily educated, she rose to the rank of professor at Boston University, teaching the craft of poetry. She conducted this career in the context of a mental disorder that eluded diagnosis or cure. Suicidal self-hatred led to repeated hospitalizations in mental in-stitutions. She became addicted to alcohol and sleeping pills. By the time she committed suicide in 1974 misery had hollowed her out and drinking had obliterated her creativity. Yet from the rising of Anne Sexton's star in 1960, with the publication of To Bedlam and Part Way Back, hers had been an important new voice in American poetry.