How Anne Sexton’s Poem ‘Her Kind’ Turns Pain into Art
In embracing the ‘witch’ figure, Sexton’s “Her Kind” pushes back against stigma. It’s also an object lesson in writing well on tough subjects.
For Anne Sexton, writing poetry provided an opportunity to use and refine difficult life experiences into art.
Born in 1928, Anne Sexton was raised in the middle-class milieu of the Greater Boston area. She married young, at 19, and never received a college degree. A few years into her marriage, she had two daughters, one in 1953 and another in 1955. In those years, as in the years to come, Sexton was hospitalized after suicide attempts and nervous breakdowns. It wasn’t until the age of 28, with the encouragement of her therapist, that Sexton began to write poetry.
Having no formal college education, Sexton began to attend poetry workshops led by John Holmes and received mentorship from the Boston-area poets W.D. Snodgrass and Robert Lowell. This informal support was enough to get Sexton writing and publishing — her debut collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back was published just four years after she began writing poetry, in 1960.
One of Sexton’s earliest poems, “Her Kind,” published in her debut collection, exemplifies the poet’s impulse to…
