COMMENT
The Poet as Celebrity
Biographies are getting fatter. The last three
I have read - of Orwell, Kafka, and Anne Sexton - are swollen with de–
tail, plus a wealth of social and psychological interpretations, in a spec–
tacular display of minute and inexhaustible research. Nothing is left out,
and everything is put in. Is it the triumph of the academic?
The biography of Anne Sexton by Diane Middlebrook is an example
of the use of academic methods in dealing with a non-academic subject.
This makes for both good and bad biography. It is good insofar as we
are given so much information about Sexton's life, the origins of her
poems in her life, her career, her poet friends, her admirers, her family,
her marriage, her children, her sexual escapades, and, above all, her men–
tal illness and frequent breakdowns, her attempted suicide, and her several
bouts with therapists. On the other hand, there is a semblance of bio–
graphical overkill. How much do we have to know about Sexton's life
and the particulars surrounding her work?
However, in this kind of absolute coverage, the book does raise a
number of questions, though implicitly, not explicitly. By its recounting
of every poetic maneuver, every poetic posture, every twist and turn of
the world of poetry, Middlebrook creates a sense of adulation of poets
and poetry that almost takes the medium out of the realm of ordinary
literature. Poets become gods and goddesses, not just writers, like those
who pursue fiction and criticism. The atmosphere becomes one of burn–
ing incense to poetry. It is a kind of adulation by versification.
In this process, there is very little reference to the social and political
milieu in which all this rarified creation takes place, except for a few
cliched references to the anti-Vietnam War movement and to the
Republican demons. Very few fiction writers, besides Bellow and Hem–
ingway, are mentioned. And the only critics referred to were teachers at
Brandeis. Hence, Sexton's poetry, and poetry in general, exist without a
background or context.
Another problem raised implicitly, but not critically, is Sexton's un–
appeasable ambition, and her relishing of her status as a celebrity. This
unanalyzed version of the media world reaches its peak when Sexton's
poems are put to some kind of musical expression by a popular band. In
general, her pursuit of her "career," like what Sexton refers to as her
"madness," does get out of hand occasionally.
On the whole, Middlebrook is not critical of Sexton's exploitation
of her "madness" by taking advantage, to the point of abusing, her rela–
tions with her children and her husband, as well as with most of her
friends and fellow poets. But Middlebrook does not hide or underplay
