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204
The Poetry of Anne Sexton
ANNE’S OEDIPUS
That Anne Sexton identified herself with Oedipus is evident in only
one modest place in her poetry, in the first collection, To Bedlam and
Part Way Back. The epigraph for the collection is from a letter of Schopenhauer
to Goethe in 1815:
It is the courage to make a clean breast of it in face of every
question that makes the philosopher. He must be like Sophocles’
Oedipus, who, seeking enlightenment concerning his terrible
fate, pursues his indefatigable enquiry, even when he divines
that appalling horror awaits him in the answer. But most of us
carry in our heart the Jocasta who begs Oedipus for God’s sake
not to inquire further . . .
Sexton’s biographer, Diane Middlebrook, reveals the previously
unavailable details of the story that led to Sexton’s use of this epigraph,
and to the poem that opens Part II of Bedlam, which contains the most
intensely confessional material in the collection. 11 “For John, Who
Begs Me Not to Enquire Further,” was Sexton’s ultimate poetic reply
to John Holmes’s fierce objections to Sexton’s “sources and subject
matter.” She should not, he warned, write about her experiences in
mental institutions or her private neuroses; these were not legitimate
subjects for poetry, and were more dangerous than useful. Although
Sexton could not have known it at the time, Holmes was to be only
the first of a series of Jocastas whom Sexton would have to confront
in the many years of productivity remaining to her. Her argument in
this poem is that of the truth-seeking Oedipus:
Not that it was beautiful,
but that, in the end, there was
a certain sense of order there;
something worth learning
in that narrow diary of my mind,
in the commonplaces of the asylum . . .
Like Oedipus, Sexton does not pretend to be a seeker after beauty
here, though she will seek beauty as well later in her poetic life; she
seeks, rather, “a certain sense of order,” if knowing the truth about