1. The term “progression” is from Alkalay-Gut; “mouvement d’expansion” is from Cunci; and George calls Letters to Dr. Y a “sequence from sickness to cure.” See Karen Alkalay-Gut, “‘For We Swallow Magic and We Deliver Anne’: Anne Sexton’s Use of Her Name,” The Anna Book: Searching for Anna in Literary History, ed. Mickey Pearlman (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1992): 139–49, p. 140; Marie Christine Cunci, “Anne Sexton (1928–1974), ou comment faire taire Jocaste,” Revue Francaise d’Etudes Americaines 7:15 (Nov. 1982): 383–394, p. 392; Diana Hume George, “Death Is a Woman, Death Is a Man: Anne Sexton’s Green Girls and the Leaves That Talk,” University of Hartford Studies in Literature: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Criticism, 18:1 (1986): 31–44, p. 32.
2. See Suzanne Juhasz, “Seeking the Exit or the Home: Poetry and Salvation in the Career of Anne Sexton,” in Sexton: Selected Criticism, ed. Diana Hume George (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1988): 303–311, p. 304.
3. See Diane Wood Middlebrook, “Poet of Weird Abundance,” Parnassus: Poetry in Review 12–13:2–1 (Spring–Winter 1985): 293–315, p. 295.
4. Alkalay-Gut, cited above, calls “Flee on Your Donkey” a “pivotal poem” (145), while Middlebrook, cited above, presents it as a transitional poem on the perspective of illness, where the speaker is not a victim but an interrogator of her illness (296, 298). Cunci, also cited above, sees Transformations as a turning point where Sexton leaves personal confession behind for something larger (392), and Leventen points out that Sexton focuses on social context, not individual psyche in Transformations; see Carol Leventen, “Transformations’ Silencings,” in Critical Essays on Anne Sexton, ed. Linda Wagner-Martin (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1989): 136–149, p. 139.
5. The connection between Sexton and Woolf, of course, does not stop here, as both were survivors of childhood sexual abuse as well as brilliant writers and suicides. See Louise DeSalvo’s groundbreaking biography, Virginia Woolf: The Impact of Childhood Sexual Abuse on Her Life and Work (Boston: Beacon, 1989).