Anne Sexton, To Bedlam and Part Way Back

Patricia Godi (Université de CLERMONT-FERRAND 2)

Ed. by Matthew Hofer, University of New Mexico
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 3.2.4: American (US) Writing and Culture: Postwar and Contemporary, 1945-present.
Vol. editors: Emory Elliott (University of California, Riverside), Dale Enggass (University of Utah), Christopher Hugh Gair (University of Glasgow), Matthew Hofer (University of New Mexico), Stephen E. Meats (Pittsburg State University), Kerry Myler (Newman University), Justin Parks (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway), Nick Selby (University of East Anglia)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1960

Places

United States (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Anne Sexton’s first book of poems, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, marked the beginning of the career of a poet who has now become an icon of American poetry. Published by Houghton Mifflin in 1960, the collection has come to be seen as one of the emblematic instances of “confessional” poetry, a trend which developed among a group of poets gathered around Robert Lowell at Boston University in the late 1950s. These poets opened up new modes of poetic expression by drawing heavily upon personal experience at a time when the aesthetics of impersonality inherited from the Modernists and American New Criticism still prevailed.

Born into an affluent New England family in Newton, Massachusetts, on November 9^t…

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2264 words

Citation: Godi, Patricia. "To Bedlam and Part Way Back". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 10 January 2019 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=8378, accessed 21 November 2024.]

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