Author Guide · Lisanne Swart
Books Written by Anne Sexton
Anne Sexton started writing poetry in her late twenties on her doctor’s suggestion, as a way of managing a breakdown after the birth of her second child. Within a decade she’d won the Pulitzer Prize. Her work is confessional in the most literal sense — depression, suicide attempts, institutionalization, desire, motherhood, and her own body appear in her poems without euphemism, at a moment when almost no one else was writing that way in public. She died by suicide in 1974, at 45. This page covers the nine collections published in her lifetime, plus the notable posthumous volumes assembled from her papers.
By Lisanne Swart · 9 collections · Confessional Poetry · Updated August 2026 · ~8 min read
Quick answer
Anne Sexton published nine poetry collections in her lifetime, from To Bedlam and Part Way Back (1960) to The Death Notebooks (1974). She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1967 for Live or Die. She died by suicide in October 1974; two further collections, The Awful Rowing Toward God and 45 Mercy Street, were assembled from her papers and published posthumously.
Key facts
- Born: November 9, 1928, Newton, Massachusetts · Died: October 4, 1974 (suicide)
- Collections published in her lifetime: 9, 1960–1974
- Award: Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, 1967, for Live or Die
- Movement: Confessional poetry, alongside Sylvia Plath and Robert Lowell, her teacher
- Posthumous collections: The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975) and 45 Mercy Street (1976), both assembled from her papers
Why trust this list: Every collection below is one I’ve read in full. Curated by Lisanne Swart.
In this guide
- Her debut, written on her doctor’s advice
- Grief, after both her parents died within months
- The Pulitzer-winning collection
- Desire, without apology
- Fairy tales, retold with real teeth
- Family, madness, and incest, named directly
- The last collection published in her lifetime
- What came after she died
- Frequently asked questions
To Bedlam and Part Way Back
Sexton’s first collection, written after her psychiatrist encouraged her to turn her breakdown and hospitalization into poems. The book follows her through a mental breakdown and partial recovery, addressed with a directness about depression and institutionalization that shocked readers in 1960.
The book that essentially created the confessional mode as Sexton, Plath, and Lowell would define it — poetry that refuses to disguise its autobiographical material as anything else.
All My Pretty Ones
Written after both of Sexton’s parents died within three months of each other, this collection continues her unflinching self-examination while widening to grief, inheritance, and what parents pass down to their children whether they mean to or not.
Less shocking than the debut only because readers now knew what to expect — the craft is noticeably tighter, and the grief is some of her most controlled writing.
Live or Die
Arranged chronologically from poems written between 1962 and 1966, tracing Sexton’s ongoing struggle with the wish to die against reasons to keep living — including “Wanting to Die” and “Sylvia’s Death,” written after Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Won the 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.
Her most fully realized single collection, and the one that made her reputation permanent rather than promising. Read this if you read only one Sexton book.
Love Poems
A collection centered on desire, adultery, and the body, written with the same directness Sexton brought to depression and grief — sex and longing treated as subjects worth this much unguarded attention, not as something to write around.
Her most sensual book, and a useful corrective to any sense that Sexton’s confessional mode was only about suffering. There’s real pleasure in these poems too, described just as candidly.
Transformations
Sexton retells seventeen Grimm fairy tales — Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel — in a wry, contemporary, often savage voice that exposes the violence and sexual undercurrents the originals only imply. A significant influence on decades of feminist fairy-tale revisionism that followed.
Her funniest book by some distance, and proof she could write outside pure autobiography without losing her voice. The wit here is sharper and more overtly political than in her confessional work.
The Book of Folly
A darker, more fragmented collection that addresses incest and family violence directly, alongside three prose pieces that move even closer to memoir than her poetry usually did.
Less unified than her earlier collections, but notable for how far she was willing to push the confessional mode’s most uncomfortable material by this point in her career.
The Death Notebooks
The last collection Sexton saw published in her lifetime, structured explicitly around mortality — imagined conversations with death, a mock-suicide note, and religious searching that would deepen in the posthumous collection that followed.
Reads differently, and more painfully, knowing it was the last book she prepared for publication herself before her death later that same year.
What came after she died
Sexton died by suicide on October 4, 1974. The Awful Rowing Toward God (1975), a collection she had substantially prepared before her death and centered on a search for religious meaning, was published the following year. 45 Mercy Street (1976), edited by her daughter Linda Gray Sexton from unfinished manuscripts, followed. The Complete Poems (1981) later gathered her full body of work, published and unpublished, into a single volume that remains the standard edition today.
Frequently asked questions
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