Anne Sexton (post 2): “It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people…I become someone else…even in moments when I’m not writing the poem”

“It’s a little mad, but I believe I am many people. When I am writing a poem, I feel I am the person who should have written it. Many times I assume these guises; I attack it the way a novelist might. Sometimes I become someone else, and when I do, I believe, even in moments when I’m not writing the poem, that I am that person. When I wrote about the farmer’s wife, I lived in my mind in Illinois; when I had the illegitimate child, I nursed it—in my mind—and gave it back and traded life. When I gave my lover back to his wife, in my mind, I grieved and saw how ethereal and unnecessary I had been. When I was Christ, I felt like Christ. My arms hurt, I desperately wanted to pull them in off the Cross. When I was taken down off the Cross and buried alive, I sought solutions; I hoped they were Christian solutions.”

from Anne Sexton interview with Barbara Kevles in 1968, published in The Paris Review, 1971. https://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4073/anne-sexton-the-art-of-poetry-no-15-anne-sexton