Because she was a religious poet whose work is part of the questing tradition, she might be usefully compared with John Donne and George Herbert. Since many of her poems are spoken from the perspective of a child speaker, the standard literary tradition for comparative purposes can include Blake and Wordsworth, Vaughan and Traherne. Extra-literary texts that illuminate her work include selections of psychoanalytic theory, especially Freudian. I try to avoid giving students a predisposition to Sexton, and instead discuss difficulties and questions as they arise in discussion. Bibliography Excellent articles on Sexton are most readily available in recent and forthcoming anthologies of criticism.
Instructors can select articles that bear most directly on their concerns.
A Biography was published by Houghton Mifflin in 1991. Critics who specialize in Sexton or who have written major essays on her, whose works will be found in most or all of the above anthologies, include Alicia Suskin Ostriker, Diane Wood Middlebrook, Diana Hume George, Estella Lauter, Suzanne Juhasz, and Linda Wagner-Martin.