♦ ♦ ♦
POETRY
Enjoy!
♦ ♦ ♦
The Fury of Abandonment
by Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton – born on November 9,1928, in Newton, Massachusetts – a deeply troubled and brilliant American poet known for her extremely personal, emotional and conversational verse. She battled mental illness for most of her life. Her first manic episode occurred in 1954, followed by a complete nervous breakdown a year later. Encouraged by her therapist to write poetry, as a means of cathartic therapy, Sexton discovered what was to be her true calling in life. Her poetry covered themes that reflected her own psychological challenges: depression, manic tendencies and suicide and nothing in her personal life was off-limits. She wrote about it all – becoming one of the most honored American poets and earning herself a Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. Sadly, her illness (today, she would have been diagnosed as suffering from bipolar disorder) began to escalate and, on October 4, 1974, she committed suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. She was forty-six years old.
The Fury of Abandonment – “Raw emotion” is what best describes this disturbing poem. One of 15 poems from the “Fury” sequence, later published in a collection titled, “The Death Notebooks.” Published just after her divorce from her husband, it was the last collection of her poetry to be published before her suicide in the autumn of 1974. The advancement of her mental decline is felt with every unapologetically tortured word. It is as riveting as it is disturbing.
Poem via poemhunters.com.
Image via lydiamagazine.gr.
heatherfromthegrove 