The Complete Poems By Anne Sexton Houghton Mifflin, 622 pp., $20 The Complete Poems of Anne Sexton is an indispensable book. Sexton is one of her generation’s best poets, and she has more appeal than many poets who are better than she.
Even great poets can be overrated. Byron defined Romanticism for many people who would have found Wordsworth and Shelley intolerably slow. E. E. Cummings used the techniques of modernism so charmingly that intelligent undergraduates are still being warned off him and pointed sternly in the direction of Eliot, Williams, and Pound. Popular poets have in common the willingness to speak primarily about sex or themselves, with the wit not to appear foolish while doing so. They are like youth: vain, repetitive, and irresistible.
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