Essay about Analysis of Anne Sexton's Poem "Her Kind"

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calles for tears.

Anne Sexton was a junior-college dropout who, inspired by emotional distress, became a poet. She won the Pulitzer Prize as well as three honorary doctorates. Her poems usually dealt with intensely personal, often feminist, subject matter due to her tortured relationships with gender roles and the place of women in society. The movies, women’s magazines and even some women’s schools supported the notion that decent women took naturally to homemaking and mothering (Schulman). Like others of her generation, Sexton was frustrated by this fixed feminine role society was encouraging. Her poem “Cinderella” is an example of her views, and it also introduces a new topic of how out of touch with reality fairy tales often are. In “Cinderella”, Anne Sexton uses tone and symbolism to portray her attitude towards traditional gender roles and the unrealistic life of fairy tales.

9) Identify the conceit in the poem. What two things are being compared? Identify one line that demonstrates this comparison and explain, in your own words, what it means. Knitting with yarn and the death of his wife. “Then mine apparell shall display before yee 5.That I am Cloathd in Holy robes for glory.” I would say this means that the memories of his wife and how things came to be is held on his back like a rock and he wants to pray about it and want god to let him know its ok.

The poem starts with the statement, “a woman who loves a woman is forever young” (Sexton 1-3). These beginning lines set a common theme of eternal youthfulness and lesbian desire. In her introduction, Sexton also plays on the imagery of old versus young in her descriptions of “old breast against young breast”

Many great literary and artistic geniuses have been troubled with deep melancholy and phrenic illness. Anne Sexton is an example of a poet with such quandaries who utilized her personal despair to inspire her poetic works. Sexton’s raw material on the inequality of women in a flawed society has sprouted an uproar for change.

“Thou ill-form’d offspring of my feeble brain” (1) is the auto diminishing way in which Anne Bradstreet starts her self-criticizing poem. She herself clearly indicates from the beginning her appreciation of her own work, by establishing a mother-child relationship; in which she connotes it as a flawed creation (as referenced in line 1) that was with her since birth, but was “snatched” (2)[taken] by her friends. She conveys throughout her poem how she felt when her work was published illicitly (although not maliciously, by her friends), exposing her flaws (8) and possibly ruining her image as a poet (line 20, she advices it not to fall in critics’ hands). However, she is still

What Anne Bradstreet lacks in creative titles, she compensates with skillful and impactful poems. During countless years of oppression, the patriarchy has subjugated women to stricter guidelines of all arts in order to achieve credibility. Similarly, Anne Bradstreet faces the same criticism and thus writes in a way that while receives criticism from many experts, still allows her to revolutionarily be a female Puritan poet within canonical English literature. Although, due to her sex Bradstreet receives more disapproval than male poets of the time. Many scholars criticize Bradstreet’s strict adherence to and fixed meter. Despite these criticisms of doggerel, Bradstreet deserves recognition as an Early American poet through her meter that establishes her as a capable female author, purposeful allusions, and her figurative language.

Anne Sexton was born Anne Gray Harvey on November 9, 1928 in Newton, Massachusetts. Her parents, Ralph Harvey and his wife, Mary Gray Staples Harvey overlooked their youngest child Anne. According to the Great Lives from History, she grew up lonely and excluded from family activities, because she was never able to reach the standards her father wanted. She felt overlooked and unwanted, and even as a child developed a reputation for doing daring and drastic things just to be noticed. Her early life was marked by episodes of rebelliousness and named by her mother as “boy-crazy” (Johnson, Sheila). After graduation, she enrolled in the Garland School and in 1948, eloped with Alfred Muller Sexton II. It was apparent that Anne suffered from serious emotional troubles when she became depressed after her second child. Although every woman in the 1950’s yearned to become a housewife and mother, Sexton found this experience shocking and devastating. She soon began psychiatric treatment with Martha Brunner-Orne and her son that “recognized Sexton’s creative potential and encouraged her to write” (Johnson, Sheila). It would soon become an outlet for Sexton’s personal problems and opinions.

Every author, poet, playwright has a subtle message that they would like present to their audience. It may be a lifelong struggle that they have put into words, or a multiple page book that took a lifetime to write. A poet by the name of Anne Sexton sought out to challenge society’s views of women by writing “Her Kind”. A poet, a playwright, and an author of children’s books, Anne Sexton writes about the conflicts of a social outcast living in modern times. She voices the hardships she faces through three different speakers in her poem. At the end of the poem, the woman is not ashamed nor afraid of whom she is and is ready to die in peace. In Anne Sexton’s poem “Her Kind”, the main idea the speaker is depicting is the multiple stereotypes placed on a woman, by society. Sexton’s vivid use of imagery paints a picture of the witch, house wife, and mother cliché, while also implying the poem is autobiographical as Sexton went through her own personal struggles during her life.

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts, in 1928. She spent her comfortable but possibly abusive childhood in Weston, Massachusetts, with her maiden great-aunt as her closest confidante. She attended one year of boarding school and one year of Garland Junior College which she considered to be a finishing school. Anne Sexton married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II when she was 19, but he had to serve in Korea shortly after their marriage, so Sexton became a fashion model. When she was 25, in 1953, Sexton gave birth to her first child and in 1955 to her second. After the birth of her first daughter, Anne Sexton suffered her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital (a hospital that treats mental disorders caused by the nervous

Anne Sexton’s Her Kind and For John Who Begs Me Not To Enquire Further are very similar, but also have key differences that make each poem emotionally and visually unique. Both poems use intense imagery to portray the emotions that Anne Sexton felt in that moment. Anne Sexton also uses the tones of each poem to interpret a sense of story in a way the reader can both relate and realize the awareness that Anne Sexton is trying to convey. Her Kind and For John Who Begs Me Not to Enquire Further are very similar when it comes to connecting and relating their tone, imagery, and sense of story towards the reader, but the types of imagery, tone, and sense of story are very different.

She had been married and then divorced and had two daughters in between. Sexton spent a large portion of her adult life seeking associations that led back into childhood. She was also greatly devoted to being a good wife and mother. She suffered a mental illness and was inspired by her therapist to start writing poetry. Much of her poetry demonstrates the painful feelings discovered towards her

The song then addresses women who live in this society, and the sort of things that they have to go through living in such a harsh environment. It explains this in sort of a story format describing a girl that was unable to support herself, so she ended up becoming a pimp for prostitution to make money; things like this are relevant to today’s society and how some women get into pornography and prostitution as an easy way to make money to support themselves. One of the last major points that is made is how people that are born into this life, see it as the only lifestyle that is fit for them, as they are all surrounded by it. This also has importance because of how relevant it is when it comes to places in California or Brooklyn

'The Abortion' by Anne Sexton is a first person narrative poem in the style of a stream of consciousness and conveys a woman's emotional and physical journey whilst undergoing an abortion. I intend to discuss how through the effective use of imagery, tone, symbolism and word choice the poet successfully builds up an atmosphere which adds to your appreciation of the poem.