Female Poet of the Day- Anne Sexton

You could think of Anne Sexton as Betty Draper: beautiful, smart, and deeply, deeply unhappy. Like our favorite Mad Men heroines, Sexton was a model as a young woman, married early, and tried her hardest to be happy as a housewife. Like Betty, though, Sexton quickly realized that a that pretty little home in the 'burbs wasn't all it was cracked up to be. Her poetry lays bare all of the ways that her life has been punctuated by mental illness and circumscribed by rigid definitions of what a woman "should" do or think or believe.
Sexton's name is right up there with a handful of other poets as one of the most-read poets of the twentieth century. Her name gets also gets coupled with Sylvia Plath's just about all the time. Maybe it's because they both killed themselves. Maybe it's because they both wrote in the twentieth century. Here at Shmoop, though, we like to think that it's because they both explored the complicated role that women played in the mid-twentieth century.

Funny thing is, Sexton tends to get a bad rap from critics – both when she first published and, well, now. Apparently her no-holds-barred emotional tell-all makes some people a little bit uneasy. Maybe it's the fact that her confessional style isn't disguised by ornate turns of phrase or any of the formal tricks that so many poets tend to have up their sleeves. Maybe it's just that we all tend to get a bit weirded out when someone we've never even met starts spilling serious dirt.


Whatever it is, "Her Kind" is quintessential Sexton – so if you're not sure whether you're a Sexton fan or foe, this poem is a good litmus test. It's the sort of poem Sexton's known for: deep emotions, straight-speaking, and a healthy dose of social critique.


Published in 1960, "Her Kind" was part of the collection To Bedlam and Part Way Back. For those of you who haven't kept up with your nineteenth-century history, "Bedlam" was the nickname for one of London's most notorious mental institutions. We're guessing that Sexton chose to reference Bedlam in the title of her first collection because, as it turns out, she began writing while spending time in a mental institution. Choosing to describe her collection as a trip "part way back" to mental health allowed Sexton to shock her readers even as she confessed her ongoing depression and sense of social alienation.


So: is Sexton making literary bank off of her own misery? Or is she just trying to find a public voice for issues which no one seems to want to talk about? Well, that's up to you…

Courtesy of Shmoop.com