Anne Sexton Suicide

A super model turned poet who suffered heavily from depression and suicidal tendencies up until 1974 killed herself through carbon monoxide poisoning with a glass of vodka in hand, wearing an elaborate fur coat. Anne Sexton an American writer, born in 1928, battled depression, mania and suicidal tendencies her whole adult life as well as being diagnosed with what is now called bipolar disorder. Sexton had a family but suffered severely from post-natal depression after the birth of her first born therefore shortly after she was admitted into a neuropsychiatric ward and was continually transported in and out of institutions for the rest of her short-lived life. Sexton found an escape from her illness when writing poems, she is well known for
This personal experience is evident in her poem 'Wanting to die' accentuated through personification and simile accent. Sexton uses personification brilliantly throughout her poem to capture the dominance and control her suicidal thoughts held over her. This technique dominates the poem much like how her thoughts dominated her life, 'and yet she waits for me, year after year, to so delicately undo an old wound." Sexton's suicidal thoughts become a woman and are given a supreme presence in the way she waits for Sexton, making it seems as if she has nowhere else to go, no matter what she does she is under the influence of self-harm. Sexton is the puppet and suicide is the puppeteer. Personification is used well to accentuate Sexton's personal story of having a long lasting struggle with suicidal tendencies and heightens her inability to control her own happiness by giving the thought processes the characteristics of power to control her mind. Simile is also used to effect to describe the sovereignty her mental illness had over her, the demining suicidal tendencies are compared to various things throughout the poem- 'Like carpenters they want to know which tools, they never ask why build?' Sexton explains the drive and persistence to commit suicide by comparing her final moments of how she would do it to carpenters tools rather than her incentive. Simile underlines the personal story successfully through the comparison of her suicidal thoughts to mundane presences, this works well to showcase her inner war between life and death, as it relates to a topic that not a lot of people have a full comprehension of, to things of common