Location: Forest Hills Cemetery, Jamaica Plain, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States
Cause of death: Suicide – Carbon Monoxide Poisoning
Photo taken by: Midnightdreary
Buy books by Anne Sexton
American poet, known for her highly personal, confessional verse. She won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967. Themes of her poetry include her suicidal tendencies, long battle against depression and various intimate details from her private life, including her relationships with her husband and children.
Sexton suffered from severe mental illness for much of her life, her first manic episode taking place in 1954. After a second episode in 1955 she was encouraged to take up poetry by her therapist. She found early acclaim with her poetry; a number of her poems were accepted by The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine and the Saturday Review. Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside distinguished poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck.
Sexton became good friends with poet Maxine Kumin and the pair rigorously critiqued each other's work and wrote four children's books together. In the late 1960s, the manic elements of Sexton's illness began to affect her career, though she still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry.
On October 4, 1974, Sexton had lunch with Kumin to revise Sexton's manuscript of The Awful Rowing Toward God. On returning home she put on her mother's old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured herself a glass of vodka, locked herself in her garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning.
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