Ann Sexton was one of the most brilliant, and troubled of the 20th Century American poets Like her close friend Sylvia Plath, she suffered from crippling depression, later diagnosed as bipolar disorder. And like Sylvia Plath she committed suicide. She began writing poetry as part of her psychotherapy, and within twelve years her highly charged work about the intimacies of her personal life had won her a Pulitzer Prize and made her a member of the Royal Society of Literature. This is the opening to her poem about the death of Sylvia Plath.
Oh Sylvia oh Sylvia
With a dead box of stones and spoons
with two children, two meteors
wandering loose in a tiny playroom
with your mouth into the sheet
into the roof beam, into the dumb prayer
where did you go.
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