For some reason I am having a hard time coming up with anything coherent to say about Anne Sexton's work. This is not because I dislike it: "For My Lover, Returning to His Wife" is one of my current Favorite Poems of All Time. But her work is so varied--so formal, so sloppy, so bad, so transcendent--that any assertion about it seems instantly questionable.

So perhaps I will merely say that this is the most generous poem about adultery I have ever read and that it works so well, I think, because Sexton steps into the wife's life as if it were her own. Such bravery, to risk becoming the person one has injured . . . a dreadful courage that makes my skin crawl and makes me cry, all in the same moment.

I thought I might quote a bit of "For My Lover" here, but excision seems to reduce the poem's power. So you should go to the link and read it as it should be read.

Instead, I will quote from E. M. Forster's novel Howards End, which I'm reading over breakfast and in waiting rooms, etc.:

Some closing of the gates is inevitable after thirty, if the mind itself is to become a creative power.