In her poetry, Anne Sexton plunges into the abyss and touches the source of regeneration. In the first 3 volumes, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, All My Pretty Ones and Live or Die, she explores the depths of her own consciousness. In the later three books, Love Poems, Transformations and The Book of Folly, she experiments with various mythopoeia providing possibilities of rebirth.

The movement of Sexton's poetic is dual: centripetal as well as centrifugal. The inturning Therapeutic mode analyzes the "cracked mirror" of the self in search of the origins of dissolution. A second, more visionary mode allows the resurrection of the true self and its reunification with others.

Anne Sexton's early poetry takes place in Bedlam, the realm of extremity and madness…. Evidences of her own fragmented psyche, that blasted identity, are scattered through the poetry in synecdochic images. Her very life is a burden: "lugging...