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Zach Danels: Essay #2

ENG 102-101-21FA

“Individuality”

What does it mean to you to be an individual? Is it the ability to make one’s own

decisions? Or is this distinction from being owned by another person simply just about that

power struggle? Does this mean freedom equals individuality? I think that it goes deeper than

that but, in her poem “Her Kind”, Anne Sexton confesses her focus on individuality as a woman

through her style of confessionalism, extended metaphor, and through her word choice and

imagery.

Having a strong focus on one’s individuality seems like a given to you or me, a healthy

human should always be trying to analyze and interpret their own opinions and desires in a

constant effort to further understand themselves. However, Sexton wrote during a time period

when it was commonplace for most women to have little to no say in their own day-to-day

activities due to overt controlling relationships with the men in their lives. The majority of

women who decided to marry before the 1960’s ended up essentially as housewives. They

would care for their husbands, cook, clean, wash the clothes, maintain the yard/garden, bear

children, and take care of those kids in the same ways they do for their husband; they were

ONLY around to ensure that their husbands wouldn’t have to worry about ANYTHING besides

what they did for work. Despite the system not necessarily being fair, it was kept because “it

worked” and the majority of this majority of women feared the consequences that could fall

upon them if they were to speak out against their situations or tried running from them. So, in a

time and place when most women felt imprisoned, Sexton was exploring her own desires and
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opinions in a way nobody had seen prior, especially from a married woman. Sexton, among

other confessional poets such as Sylvia Plath did not fare well after this level of intense

introspection, one confessional poet of the name Adrienne Rich is famously documented

saying, “We found ourselves/ Reduced to I” (2. The Poetry Foundation Editors). Confessional

poetry and the deep level of self-introspection that came with it seemed to have a negative

effect on the poets themselves, which in Plath and Sexton’s cases may have arguably caused

their suicides. It is widely believed that confessional poets were already prone to being

emotionally unstable, however it is intriguing to entertain the idea of these poets possibly

becoming existential victims to their own craft.

In Sexton’s poem, Her Kind, she explores the lives of 3 different fictional women from a

first-person present-perfect-progressive perspective. She also makes it clear that she shares

similarities with each of the individual women invoking the title phrase “I have been her kind”

to end each stanza. This writing style forces the reader to initially think that Sexton has been

through these life experiences herself, which the reader realizes isn’t what she is saying at all.

(This is made clear when Sexton suddenly refers to the woman as “That woman”, changing to a

3rd person perspective, before relating the woman to herself with the title phrase.) Sexton is

instead describing how she has learned the lessons of each of these three women, now making

the reader think about how Sexton would have acquired said lessons without being a witch in

the night, a cave dweller, or a woman being driven into town on a carriage toward her death.

Despite being a lesser-used literary technique in confessional poetry, I believe that Sexton is

using 3 metaphors to describe the different major stages in an adult woman’s life. First, would
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be the “possessed witch” from stanza one. The descriptions given to this witch could easily be

used by a spiteful old woman describing a young girl who likes to go out and party; “braver at

night”, “dreaming evil”, “twelve fingered, out of mind”. Sexton also refers to this witch as a

“lonely thing” which could be a personal confession of Sexton’s that states that a party-driven

lifestyle like this leads to having no meaningful friends, resulting in being lonely. The second

stanza takes on the tone of a hard-working mother who isn’t given the recognition that she

deserves, a sadly common stereotype from the mid 1900’s that Sexton most likely experienced

and fought against herself. Some critics believe that the cave itself may even represent a

mother’s womb (3. Baldwin, 2021), using the phrase “the warm caves in the woods” strictly to

describe the women capable of being good mothers, excluding others that would be colder

caves in the same woods, or less fit mothers. Of course, “the worms and the elves” would be

the kids living in the house. Lastly, Sexton introduces another witch-like woman who is being

driven into a village on a cart. This seems like a woman who has been weathered by life, you

could even imagine it being the same woman from stanza two after putting up with her lifestyle

for so long. The most important lines in this poem lie just before the title phrase at the end of

each stanza, the first woman is “not a woman yet”, the second woman is “misunderstood”, and

the third is “not ashamed to die”. These clearly tell a chronological story, which is where I

believe Sexton’s true confession lies. This poem is about the pitfalls women fall into at a young

age, the thankless work that women go through as wives and mothers, and the acceptance that

a woman should feel when nearing death due to all of the good that they have done for those

around them. They shouldn’t be ashamed to die, nobody should, yet we all still fear it. This

metaphor even gave me some ease and insight into my own fear of regret on an unavoidable
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death bed. We all run the same risk of it but learning to live life for its journey rather than for

the result has proven to be the most effective strategy for many time-and-time again.

Sexton’s imagery and word choice are the cherries on top that really make this poem

powerful, and they’re also the initial reason that I wanted to analyze the poem on a deeper

level. When describing the first woman, Sexton uses dark and grotesque diction such as

“possessed”, “evil”, “lonely”, “twelve-fingered”. She also uses alliteration of the letter B in the

line “haunting the black air, braver at night”, which makes this line read in a more aggressive

and forceful way. This affect is more pronounced when the line is spoken out loud, like most

imagery in poetry for that matter. In stanza two, Sexton chooses words that embody a home

environment such as “warm caves” when we’d normally associate caves with cool damp

temperatures. Or her decision to choose the meal “supper”, which in American culture is the

largest meal of the day and is often associated with comfort foods, favorite foods, larger

portions, and soon after relaxing and drifting off to sleep. These small word choices further

demonstrate the maternal habits of this particular fictional woman with whom Sexton relates

herself to. The last stanza is interesting, as it is the only stanza where the fictional woman

addresses somebody other than the reader. This alone creates a sort of bystander effect in the

reader, but also creates the image of a scene where a woman who is tied up on a carriage is

spilling her final words to the driver; it’s a fairly powerful image and it is mostly created by a

simple change in who the character is addressing. Sexton chooses diction that suits this

powerful and confessional final stanza as well, words such as “bright”, “flames”, and “crack” are

abrasive and short words that stand out clearly during a first read or listen. The choice of the

death-related term “survivor” in order to maintain rhyme-scheme also aids in creating the
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fearless, shameless, powerful theme of female independence that Sexton is projecting, or

confessing rather.

Understanding that this poem was written in the year 1960 in America adds

tremendously to the confessional power that it holds. Women were heavily limited in their

freedoms that “the freest country in the world” couldn’t seem to allow them. Of course, there

were women like Sexton who thankfully began to break this mold to create a more balanced

and equitable society where people do not have to feel unrightfully oppressed by others based

off of gender. Sexton’s ideas of female independence seem obvious because they were but

were ignored for so long that emotions began to boil over and we are left with golden lines of

poetry full of imagery and subtext to analyze because of it. So, this final paragraph is dedicated

to Anne, and her ability to turn her lemons into lemonade.

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Works Cited

1. “Her Kind by Anne Sexton - Poems | Academy of American Poets.” Poets.org, Academy

of American Poets, https://poets.org/poem/her-kind.  

2. "The Editors". “An Introduction to Confessional Poetry.” Poetry Foundation, Poetry

Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/151109/an-introduction-to-
confessional-poetry.

3. Baldwin, Emma. "Her Kind by Anne Sexton". Poem

Analysis, https://poemanalysis.com/anne-sexton/her-kind/. Accessed 27 September
2021.