Life & Wisdom Quote by Anne Sexton

Sexton yokes saints and poets together with a sly, dangerous compliment: both are people who can’t stop. “Moderation” is the civic virtue everyone praises because it keeps the social machine from overheating. Sexton swats it away. Saints, in the popular imagination, aren’t merely good; they’re excessive in goodness, embarrassingly so, the kind of devotion that looks like bad judgment until it’s canonized. By placing poets in that same category, Sexton reframes the artist’s temperament as a kind of secular fanaticism. Not disciplined craft first, but a surplus of feeling that refuses to behave.

The line’s engine is its pivot from “moderation” to “exuberance.” Exuberance isn’t just joy; it’s spillover. It suggests language that runs ahead of propriety, confession that keeps talking after the room wants silence. That’s Sexton’s territory. As a central figure in confessional poetry, writing through depression, hospitalization, and the intense scrutiny directed at women who spoke too plainly, she understood how “reasonable” can be a muzzle. The quote defends extremity as an ethic: if you’re going to reach anything like grace or art, you do it by risking too much, not by calibrating yourself to be palatable.

There’s also a quiet sting: society tolerates holy excess because it can sanctify it, but poetic excess gets branded as instability, narcissism, hysteria. Sexton insists they’re the same fuel. The price is obvious. Exuberance can be generative, and it can be consuming. That tension is the point.