Why James L. Dickey Became Anne Sexton's Nemesis

Emily Temple divulges the reasons for an historic rift between James L. Dickey and Anne Sexton in an article recently published at Literary Hub. According to the story, Dickey wrote a negative review of Sexton's All My Pretty Ones in the April 28, 1963 edition of the New York Times Book Review. Temple: "He . . . did not like it. 'It would be hard to find a writer who dwells more insistently on the pathetic and disgusting aspects of bodily experience,' he wrote." From there: 

...as though this made the writing more real, and it would also be difficult to find a more hopelessly mechanical approach to reporting these matters than the one she employs. Her attitude, widely cited as “compassionate,” is actually a curious compound of self-deprecatory cynicism and sentimentality-congratulating-itself-on-not-being-caught. . . . [Her] habitual gravitation to the domestic and the “anti-poetic” seem to me as contrived and mannered as any romantic poet’s harking after galleons and sunsets and forbidden pleasures.

According to Linda Gray Sexton and Lois Ames, the editors of Anne Sexton: A Self-Portrait in Letters, Sexton was devastated, in part because she admired Dickey’s work. Sexton’s friend, the poet Gene Baro wrote to her, suggesting that Sexton simply ignore the review, but instead she cut it out of the paper and carried around in her wallet, and responded to Baro this way [...]

Read on at Literary Hub to see Sexton's response, and more!