The Poet and the Monk:
An Anne Sexton Love Story

“You are awfully handsome to be a monk,” she started one letter. “You have amazing eyes.” It was two days before Valentine’s Day, 1962. Anne Sexton would keep the monk’s photograph over her desk. Her unlikely muse, this monk—there whenever she wrote poems.

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Sexton began writing poems in 1957. She called it “a kind of rebirth” following a nervous breakdown. Early work appeared in The Hudson Review, The Antioch Review, and the Christian Science Monitor, and then The New Yorker. Her debut, To Bedlam and Part Way Back, was released in 1960.

While the book was in preparation for publication, Sexton wrote to the poet W.D. Snodgrass: “I certainly don’t believe in God either and that’s rather sad of me.” She was writing about her friend Ruth Soter, a Catholic convert who’d given Sexton a cross and suggested the poet go to confession—after Sexton admitted that she’d had an abortion. It was strange advice. Sexton was not a Catholic, although one might call her Catholic curious.

Sexton returned the cross to Soter, and said “I think I was in danger of loving it too much.” She then wrote the poem “With Mercy for the Greedy,” and invoked it to Soter: “For my friend, Ruth, who urges me to make an appointment for the Sacrament of Confession.” Sexton’s poem captures her religious sense: “I detest my sins and I try to believe / in The Cross. I touch its tender hips, its dark jawed face, / its solid neck, its brown sleep.” She wants to have faith, “But I can’t. Need is not quite belief.” Although she wears wore her friend’s cross, which “tapped me lightly as a child’s heart might,” she “was born / doing reference work in sin, and born / confessing it.”

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His first letter came in the summer of 1961. Of all the fan mail for her first book, she was especially pleased by his note. What a surprise: a letter from a Benedictine monk. She tells him that she is working “slowly” on her second book: “I wobble on a drunken sea, crawling between pebbles and slow fish, never knowing if anyone will like any poem.” She admits “I don’t know much about the life of a Monk (do you capitalize monk?) but I would like to.” Sexton always felt the pull of religion—particularly the strangeness of it. The Protestant faith of her family was distant and formal. Catholicism—all that blood and guts, song and sin—intrigued her.

“Believe me,” she tells the monk, “I treasure the thought of your prayers and Mass intentions (in case it’s true, I tell my Catholic friend . . . in case it’s true, I tell myself, and plead with it to be true, after all).” She includes a quote from the theologian Father Romano Guardini, which she would later use as an epigraph for the second section of her next book, All My Pretty Ones (1962): “I want no pallid humanitarianism—if Christ be not God, I want none of him; I will hack my way through existence alone.” She sends him some. She hopes that she will hear more from him, and says “Your letter gives me great pleasure and great fear.”

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We don’t know his name. Sexton’s daughter, in compiling her mother’s letters, gave him the pseudonym of Brother Dennis Farrell. He was young. A teacher.

Was he in love?

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The monk had written her on Gaudete Sunday. It was Advent. He had composed her a longer, ten-page letter, but didn’t send it. He sent Sexton a short letter, and a crucifix. She fashioned a necklace from some package string, and started wearing the crucifix, saying “I will never wear it without a feeling of humility and awareness.”

She replies to him on December 22, 1961. “I am deeply touched,” she says, and thanks him for the “Thirty Masses”—the Catholic practice of 30 Masses said for the deceased. She types her letter to him after midnight. It is cold, with patches of snow, and “the landscape is fired by moonlight.” She confesses: “I am thinking of you somehow… because I’m wearing your crucifix, I guess.” She thinks about Christmas, and admits “I wish that I knew you better. I wish that I knew God better.” She says that she will pray.

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During this time, she wrote “The Last Believer” for Vogue—an essay about Santa Claus and her childhood. She remembers that when she was a bit older, and her sister had children, her father would still dress up as Santa Claus. Sexton would put on his makeup: rouge on his cheeks, and “great gobs of clown white on his eyebrows.” “In those moments,” she recalls, “standing in my parents’ bathroom, being expert in my teenage field, soothing my father and whispering to him in the five a.m. light, I was closer to him than I had ever been.”

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The monk sent her a photograph, but she hadn’t asked for one. She is happy to receive it, though, and jokes “now that I have seen you with your face undressed before me, tells me that you are not a monk at all but a matador.” She tells him that she’s been working on a one-act play, including a psychiatrist, a priest, and a woman who has visions of Christ. She again appreciates the monk’s prayers, but doesn’t feel like he, or anyone, could convert her: “for some reason I love faith, but have none. The girl in my play (who is after all, me) says, after she has been cured of her visions ‘belief like that is like reaching up into the sky and touching a live wire.’”

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Sometimes she writes him short, breathless notes, as on May 17, 1962. She tells the monk that he was the reason that she wrote a particular set of poems. “Your letters have a profound effect upon me! You can’t imagine!”

He answers with a deeply personal letter, and at first, she struggles to respond in equal turn. “I write now because I need you in some way that I can’t explain,” she writes. “I do not know why or how, but I need your love, in the truth of it, the gentleness of it, the Godliness of it. Knowing you, at times better than myself, I ask for it without fear.”

A few weeks later, she sends him a long, intense note. “Dear friend, I am a very direct person. If there were one thing, one small thing wrong between us, I would speak up.” She says: “Your letters give me many things . . . an aura of yourself, of God, of a different life, of a constant friend. I love you. I know you love me.” But she worries that if he truly knew her, that he would no longer love her. She is afraid “that I’ll lose you . . . I keep losing people.”

She feels comfortable confessing to him. She talks about her writing room, full of bookshelves: “I hoard books. They are people who do not leave.” She says “I am actually a ‘suburban housewife’ only I write poems and sometimes I am a little crazy.” She admits to drinking before dinner, with lunch, at hotel rooms when she gives readings and colleges. “You see,” she writes, “I am given to excess. That’s all there is to it. I have found that I can control it best in a poem.” She says that she sometimes goes nude into their backyard swimming pool.

She knows that she is rambling.

She sends the monk a poem, “For Eleanor Boylan Talking with God.” The narrator is in the kitchen with Eleanor, who “stands in her lemon-colored sun dress / motioning to God with her wet hands / glossy from the washing of egg plates. / She tells him! She tells him like a drunk / who doesn’t need to see to talk. / It’s casual but friendly. / God is as close as the ceiling.”

She then thinks of her vision of God: “large, covering up the sky / like a great resting jellyfish.”

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Sexton once told an interviewer that her poetry “should be a shock to the senses. It should almost hurt.”

Her attempts at prayer might have come from the same place. She tells the monk that she recently tried to pray while “in deep ugly need,” but didn’t know the right words. She ponders their connection; “your life is made up of belief and mine of doubt.” She thinks “It must be a diff. world . . . to believe instead of longing to.”

The monk recommends that she reads The Way of the Cross. She says the book is “giving me a new insight and love and understanding of Jesus and of his humanity.” She thinks often of the Virgin Mary, and wishes to know “What was the weather and temp. in Bethlehem that night? What was she wearing? How long was her labor?”

She listens to the evening rosary on the radio while she drives.

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“Suddenly,” the monk wrote to her, “I found myself within a human relationship that I had often dreamed of, but never realized existed.”

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In 1963, he said he was going to leave the monastery, what he called “leaping over the wall.” Sexton thinks this wall was good, it allows one to have a closer relationship with God—and it allowed she and him to have this relationship from a safe distance.

Her rejoinder is firm: “Our letters . . . no matter how direct and human they may seem to you are not to be compared to a direct relationship. In a letter (no matter how quickly it is written or honestly or freely or lovingly) it is more possible to be loving and lovable, more possible to reach out and to take in . . . there are no walls in a letter, no objects—the words can fly out of your heart (via the fingers) and no one really need live up to them. I mean this seriously and coldly and (as always) lovingly.”

She feels guilty. “You must listen to me, for I feel I have somehow deceived you into thinking this is really a human relationship. It is a letter relationship between humans.” Love, she explains to him, doesn’t exist in this way—and she and him “wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for paper and stamps and the U.S. mail.” Such a love built from letters is “built on air and ghosts,” and disappears when the lovers actually meet. Sexton worries that her words—her flirtations, perhaps—have given the monk a romantic notion of the outside world.

She spends three hours writing the letter. She stops to have dinner with her family, and then drinks. She did the dishes, put the children to bed, and then her husband came into her writing room “and took 5 silly polaroid pictures of me.” She already has a life. The monk was only a fantasy for her.

She tells the monk he will leave his monastery, get married, and his wife “won’t let you write letters like this.” She affirms “I wish we were real.” But she notes that so often in the letters that they’ve put each other on pedestals: the monk and the poet. She thinks he would be disappointed by her.

She struggles to finish the letter.

She quotes to him from “Letters to Milena” by Franz Kafka: “writing letters… means to denude oneself before ghosts, something for which they greedily wait. Written kisses don’t reach their destination, rather they are drunk on the way by ghosts.”

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He did not respond to that letter. Sexton wrote him again on August 2, 1963. She doesn’t even know if he is still at the monastery. She shares a poem with him, but it is a shorter note. An acknowledgment of their end.

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For years, there is only silence.

Then he writes back to Sexton in 1966. He has left the monastery. She immediately responds on December 10, 1966. She says he “shouldn’t have left me with this silence.” He’d previously mentioned an interest in moving to Chicago. Sexton had done a reading there, and she ends her letter: “We might have met, or at least spoken for a minute. But things like that can’t happen if I don’t know where you are.”

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Maybe they did meet in Chicago. Maybe he shook her hand, and held it a second longer. Maybe we don’t always tell the whole truth in our letters, or in our thoughts.

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Sexton drafted her final book in two and half weeks during January 1973. Two of those days were spent in a mental hospital, where she spoke with a priest. She told him that she wasn’t sure if she believed in God. “I can’t go to church,” she said. “I can’t pray.” She wished to take communion, but knew that she could not. She feared formal conversion: “it would ruin, it would formulate, my thinking: I’d want Him to be my God, anyway. I don’t want to be taught about Him; I want to make him up.”

The priest read Sexton’s drafts aloud to her. “Your typewriter is your altar,” he said.

The Awful Rowing Toward God was published a year after her suicide.

The invocation: “For Brother Dennis, wherever he is.”