Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Sexton

Mortality hits harder when it arrives wearing literary drag. Sexton’s “I am not immortal” sounds plain until she bolts it to “Faustus and I are the also-ran,” yanking the reader from confession into a sly, bruised joke about ambition and its price. Faust is the canonical striver who tries to buy his way out of human limits; Sexton, a poet often read as confession incarnate, refuses the romantic myth that art, notoriety, or extremity can confer exemption. She doesn’t even claim tragic grandeur. She puts herself in the second tier: not the hero of the cautionary tale, just another contestant who didn’t win.

“Also-ran” is the key insult, and it cuts two ways. It demystifies Faust - not a towering archetype but a failed operator in a rigged race against time. It also demystifies Sexton’s own cultural role. The mid-century American fascination with the poet as burning comet (the Plath-shadowed narrative, the canonization of suffering) promised a kind of afterlife: if not heaven, then immortality-by-legend. Sexton punctures that bargain. The line refuses the glamour of the doomed genius and the theological drama of damnation, replacing both with a modern, deadpan social category: loser.

The subtext is less resignation than acid clarity. If even Faust can’t outrun the body, no amount of lyric intensity will purchase permanence. Sexton makes mortality sound like a verdict delivered by an announcer at a track meet: brisk, public, humiliating. That tonal choice is the point. It’s not just that she knows she’ll die; it’s that she distrusts every grand story that pretends death can be edited out.