Before her death in October 1974, Anne Sexton completed corrections to the galleys of The Awful Rowing Toward God, which would be published posthumously. The poems in this collection are fiercely personal and intensely emotional, surrealistic in their imagery and plaintive in their faith. Rowing met with censure and disapproval from a number of literary scholars and critics at the time it was published, and is today still held up as evidence that Sexton's powers as a poet were weakening over time, or somehow debased by her "madness" and suicide attempts. I believe, however, that the poems in this collection are some of Sexton's most powerful and remarkable work; the poems cut to the bone, exposing the inner workings of not only Sexton's poetics but her idiosyncratic faith as well.
Sexton could not do otherwise. As Erica Jong wrote in her New York Times remembrance of the poet, Sexton "sometimes seemed like a woman without skin. She felt everything so intensely, had so little capacity to filter out pain that everyday events often seemed unbearable to her. Paradoxically it is also that skinlessness which makes a poet. One must have the gift of language, of course, but even a great gift is useless without the other curse: the eyes that see so sharply they often want to close."
That ability to both see sharply and feel deeply helped Sexton create, in The Awful Rowing Toward God, a work that compels the reader to experience the world as the poet does, in all its bleakness and despair, yes, but also as a place in which hope ”" and the possibility of redemption ”" do still exist. In this paper I will discuss the ways in which, far from being inferior, the work in this collection is luminous and compelling in its imagery, language and subject matter, and stands as an example of the ways in which Sexton's work was maturing at the time of her death.