Anne Sexton (Sylvia Plath)

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Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath -- both "confessional" poets -- met in Boston in 1958 as members of Robert Lowell’s poetry class and instantly became friends. Sexton encouraged Plath to write from her experiences and from a more feminine perspective. Their first collections, both published in 1960, were critically acclaimed. Plath’s, however, was to be the only book of poems published in her lifetime. In September 1962, she separated from her husband, the poet Ted Hughes, and wrote at least 26 poems in a fierce burst of creativity. Five months later she put her head in a gas oven. Hughes’s publication of her final poems in Ariel (1965) precipitated the rise to fame that would eventually overshadow Sexton. Both women were awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, Plath posthumously. But though Sexton’s poems are still read and appreciated, Plath’s contentious relationship with Hughes and her dramatic death made her a phenomenon. Sexton said of Plath “We talked death with burned-up intensity, both of us drawn to it like moths to an electric light bulb, sucking on it.” After several more collections, which critics met with increasing indifference, Sexton, too, committed suicide.