Turpin Strikes Again: Early Anne Sexton Poetry Discovered in Digital Archives

Zachary Turpin, the University of Idaho professor who identified previously unseen writings by Walt Whitman, has struck again, this time in collaboration with Erin Singer, a professor at Tennessee Tech, finding several notable poems in Anne Sexton's digital archives only just now brought to readers' attention. Alison Flood, at The Guardian, writes: "A handful of forgotten early works by Anne Sexton, in which the American confessional poet explores a brighter array of subjects than her usual darker fare, has been uncovered by scholars and will see the light of day for the first time in more than half a century." From there: 

Sexton, known for her Pulitzer prize-winning poetry about mental illness and death, began writing after she was admitted to a psychiatric hospital following a breakdown. One of the US’s most acclaimed poets, she killed herself at the age of 45 in 1974, leaving behind her collections including her 1960 debut To Bedlam and Part Way Back and 1967’s Live or Die, which won the Pulitzer.

The lost work – four poems and an essay – was written in the late 1950s. In the poem Winter Colony, Sexton writes about skiing, of how: “We ride the sky down, / our voices falling back behind us, / unraveling like smooth threads.” In These Three Kings, she addresses fellow poet Louis Simpson’s admonition that “like ceremony and dance, praise should be forbidden to poets of this generation”, repeating the three words as she writes about a family Christmas. And in the essay Feeling the Grass, Sexton considers her husband’s gardening aspirations: “If I understood men, I would understand their need for a perfect lawn. We live in a square house on an average street in the suburbs, where the lawn is a very important thing.”

All five pieces appeared in the Christian Science Monitor between July 1958 and July 1959, which is where Zachary Turpin, assistant professor of American literature at the University of Idaho, discovered them while searching Sexton’s digital archive. Turpin, who has previously uncovered lost writings by Walt Whitman, worked with Erin Singer, assistant professor of English at Louisiana Tech, to look for any mention of the works.

“I remember early in our search, we were in the special collections library with a stack of Sexton’s work divided between us,” said Singer. “With every book that we moved to the ‘no, it’s not here’ stack, the more convinced I was that we had found something that was lost to us as a reading public. It was tremendously exciting.”

Read more at The Guardian.