Anne Sexton Started Writing at 28 After a Breakdown
Quick answer: Anne Sexton started writing poetry at 28 after a breakdown, learned the sonnet from a television lecture, and won the Pulitzer Prize barely ten years later.
One evening in late 1956, a twenty eight year old housewife in suburban Boston, recently home from psychiatric hospital, switched on the educational channel and watched the critic I. A. Richards explain, step by step, how a sonnet is built. She had never studied poetry. She had eloped at nineteen, modelled for a Boston agency, had two small daughters, and had just survived the worst year of her life. By her own later account she watched to the end and decided she could try that herself. She wrote her first sonnet, and then dozens more.
Ten years later Anne Sexton won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. The distance between those two sentences, from adult education beginner to major American poet inside a single decade, was crossed with no degree, no connections and no permission, which is exactly why her beginning, more than her legend, deserves a working writer's attention.
The lowest room
Sexton's crisis was real and clinical. After the birth of her second daughter in 1955 she suffered severe postpartum depression, was hospitalised, and in November 1956 attempted suicide. Her psychiatrist, Dr. Martin Orne, looking for something that might anchor her between sessions, encouraged her to write down what she was feeling, telling her, as she often recounted, that what she wrote might matter to other people going through the same thing.
It was not a cure, and nobody involved pretended it was. It was an assignment. The difference between Sexton and most people handed such an assignment is that she treated writing as a craft to be learned rather than a diary to be kept, and she went looking for teachers immediately.
Adult education, all nerve
In January 1957 she enrolled in John Holmes's poetry workshop at the Boston Center for Adult Education, the least glamorous doorway in American letters. There she met Maxine Kumin, another young suburban mother, and the two began a working friendship that lasted the rest of Sexton's life, reading drafts to each other down the telephone for hours at a stretch. Within the year Sexton was producing poems at a ferocious rate and submitting them everywhere.
The speed of what followed still startles. In 1958 she joined Robert Lowell's graduate seminar at Boston University, sharing the room with Sylvia Plath, despite holding no degree of any kind; a summer conference brought encouragement from W. D. Snodgrass, whose candid family poems showed her what her own material might become. Major magazines began accepting her work within two years of her first attempts. Houghton Mifflin published her first collection, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, in 1960, barely three years after her first workshop.
The forbidden subject
Her teacher John Holmes urged her, with genuine concern, not to publish the asylum poems, warning that such naked material would embarrass her later. Sexton's answer was a poem addressed directly to him, arguing that the shamed thing, brought into form, is precisely what a reader in trouble needs. Their exchange remains one of the most instructive quarrels in modern poetry, and not because either dismissed craft; both prized it. The dispute was over whether any subject can be off limits to it.
She kept the subject and doubled the craft. Her early books are strikingly formal, rhymed and metred, the sonnet lecture bearing visible fruit; the wildness of the content rode on disciplined lines. All My Pretty Ones followed in 1962, then in 1966 Live or Die, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1967. By 1972 the woman who had entered poetry through an evening class held a professorship at Boston University.
An honest accounting
None of this should be varnished. Sexton's illness did not retreat because the books succeeded, and she died by suicide in October 1974, aged forty five. Poetry did not save her life, and pretending otherwise cheapens both the poems and the illness. What poetry demonstrably gave her was eighteen years of work, identity, friendship, income and meaning, which is what it can actually offer anyone. That is not nothing.
It is also worth insisting that she became a superb maker of poems, not merely a brave confessor. Transformations, her 1971 book retelling Grimm fairy tales in a wicked narrating voice, shows a poet in complete technical command, and it is the best answer to anyone who reduces her to her biography.
What her beginning teaches
Start with a form. Sexton's entry point was not self-expression; it was a televised lesson in the sonnet's architecture, and that scaffold is what let an untrained writer climb. A beginner copying her sequence, learn one strict form, write badly inside it, find one workshop, find one telephone friend, submit early and often, is following the most proven on-ramp poetry has.
Notice, too, how communal her rise was. Every step, Orne's assignment, Holmes's class, Kumin's phone line, Lowell's seminar, Snodgrass's encouragement, came from putting herself in rooms where poems were taken seriously. Nobody gets discovered at their own kitchen table. Editors reading slush, classmates reading drafts, judges reading contest entries: that is the machinery of a poetry life, and she engaged all of it within thirty six months of her first poem.
Where to start reading her
Begin with To Bedlam and Part Way Back to hear the debut voltage, then Transformations for the pure craft. Her 1971 Paris Review interview is essential reading for any late beginner: she tells the whole story, the television sonnet included, with disarming frankness. Because her poems remain in copyright, read them in the collected editions rather than in stray fragments online, where the lineation is often mangled.
What poets can take from this
- Learn one strict form until it feels like a tool, then loosen; scaffolds beat blank pages for beginners.
- Join the least intimidating workshop you can find; Sexton's was an adult evening class, not a university.
- Find one reader you can telephone with drafts for years, your own Kumin.
- Submit early: her first magazine acceptances came within two years of her first serious poem.
- Write the subject you have been warned off, but bring your best technique to it, not your rawest draft.
- Keep art and treatment distinct: writing can hold meaning without carrying the whole weight of recovery.
Try it yourself
Find a short lesson on the sonnet, in a book or online, and write your first or fiftieth sonnet tonight about a room in which your life once changed.
Questions
When did Anne Sexton start writing poetry?
In late 1956 and 1957, at twenty eight, after a psychiatric breakdown, when her doctor encouraged her to write and a television lecture on the sonnet showed her where to begin. Her first collection appeared only three years later, in 1960.
Did Anne Sexton win the Pulitzer Prize?
Yes. Her third collection, Live or Die, published in 1966, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967, roughly a decade after she wrote her first serious poems.
Did Anne Sexton have any formal training in poetry?
None. She held no degree, learned in an adult education workshop with John Holmes and later in Robert Lowell's Boston University seminar, and traded drafts with Maxine Kumin for years. Boston University eventually made her a professor anyway.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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