Love & Passion Quote by Anne Sexton

Sexton’s line is a dare disguised as a confession: she drags poetry out of the tasteful parlor and into the body. The comparison to sex isn’t a cheap shock; it’s a calibration of intensity. She’s telling you that the poem’s afterglow is not just pride in craft but a whole chemical weather system - release, tenderness, power, and a weird, lucid quiet. By framing it as “better even than after sex,” she isn’t insulting sex so much as admitting how ravenous the need to make something can be, especially for someone whose inner life runs hot and dangerous.

The phrasing matters. “The beautiful feeling” is bluntly sensory, not literary. “On the whole” is the sly qualifier of a grown-up realist: she knows sex can be ecstatic and also complicated, and she’s making room for that mess without losing the point. Then the punch: “and that’s saying a lot.” It’s wry, almost conversational, like she’s letting you in on an unseemly truth over a cigarette.

Context is everything with Sexton. As a major confessional poet, she wrote from the pressure points of mental illness, domestic performance, and desire, turning private pain into public artifact. The subtext is that writing isn’t therapy-lite; it’s an act of survival that produces its own kind of climax: not just pleasure, but proof. Proof that the chaos can be shaped, that the self can momentarily cohere, that loneliness can be translated into a voice someone else might recognize.