Sexton felt great trepidation about registering for the class, asking a friend to make the phone call and accompany her to the first session.

Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck.

Her first volume of poetry, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was published in 1960, and included the poem "Her Kind", which uses the persecution of witches as an analogy for the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.

In the late 1960s, the manic elements of Sexton's illness began to affect her career, though she still wrote and published work and gave readings of her poetry.

[10] Within 12 years of writing her first sonnet, she was among the most honored poets in the U.S.: a Pulitzer Prize winner, a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the first female member of the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa.

Sexton included numerous topics which were then regarded as obscene and repulsive, especially for women to talk about publicly at the time.

Maxine Kumin described Sexton's work: "She wrote openly about menstruation, abortion, masturbation, incest, adultery, and drug addiction at a time when the proprieties embraced none of these as proper topics for poetry.

"Starting as a relatively conventional writer, she learned to roughen up her line ... to use as an instrument against the 'politesse' of language, politics, religion [and] sex.

The title came from her meeting with a Roman Catholic priest who, unwilling to administer last rites, told her "God is in your typewriter."

[17] Her work started out as being about herself, however as her career progressed she made periodic attempts to reach outside the realm of her own life for poetic themes.

Robert Lowell, Adrienne Rich, and Denise Levertov commented in separate obituaries on the role of creativity in Sexton's death.

Diane Middlebrook's biography states that a separate personality named Elizabeth emerged in Sexton while under hypnosis.

[5] During the writing of the Middlebrook biography, her daughter, Linda Gray Sexton, stated that she had been sexually assaulted by her mother.

[22][25] In 1994, she published her autobiography Searching for Mercy Street: My Journey Back to My Mother, Anne Sexton, which includes her own accounts of the abuse.

[11] Middlebrook received the tapes after she had written a substantial amount of the first draft of Sexton's biography, and decided to start over.

Orne considered the "affair" with the second therapist (given the pseudonym "Ollie Zweizung" by Middlebrook and Linda Sexton) to be the catalyst that eventually resulted in her suicide.