I was delighted to wake up to this today. This is the poem that made me an Anne Sexton fan. The last two lines are goosebump worthy. I devoured this type of poetry in high school and it got me labeled the school "feminist." Really, I was just working on finding my own voice and it just so happened that Sexton, Didion, and other women of the '60s and '70s helped me find the courage to do so through their own works. There's a whitewashing of the past by a lot of people today who look to the '50s as a utopia for women due to the romanticization of the housewife archetype. If that's a woman's calling, that is beautiful. It's not every woman's calling. Those like Sexton worked hard to show that's okay too. I thank her for that, and for her radical honesty.
I was going to say, quite a few people might have been happy doing housework or boring outside-the-house work, but Sexton was a writer, so of course she wasn't.
Oh wow, you and Emily Baldo did such a wonderful job analyzing Anne Sexton’s amazing poem “Her Kind”, Liza! I had actually never heard of her until now. This is the kind of feminist poetry that I would enjoy reading and would actually make me think and help bridge the gap between men and women, unlike today’s social justice drek all about things like “toxic masculinity” and “white feminism” or bizarre musicals about the vagina or exhibits about period blood. This is what real feminism by a woman who actually suffered under second-class citizenship looks like. She speaks in this poem of the rigid gender expectations and gender roles placed on her and all her fellow women in the 20th Century and how despite the progress made, she still feels like very little has changed and women continued to be held back (which was undoubtedly true, this is why the Women’s Liberation Movement was needed). Sexton expresses frustration with all these qualities that are imposed on her despite them not being representative of her personality or who she really is because of her gender. I’ve seen the ideas discussed in Anne Sexton’s poems acted out in real life in Liza’s Instagram comments section. I remember seeing one commentor accuse Liza of being “the most pick me girl ever.” because she doesn’t like today’s feminist poetry, essentially saying she was a traitor to her gender. I also remember on another post Liza did at the beach where she was wearing a swimsuit top and tight fitting clothing a man commented that she was just doing this to get male attention. This comment is classic chauvinism and Liza responded by eloquently explaining that there a big difference between admiring a woman’s beauty and objectifying her. What these examples show is exactly what Sexton was trying to convey here. Liza as a woman is attacked by woke leftists for not acting the way they believe a woman should and by a sexist male pig for dressing too “sexy” for his liking and therefore she must just be looking for sex. 🤦♂️ As a woman she gets attacked from all sides including by other woman for not thinking, talking, acting, or dressing “as a woman should.” You know what I say? I say we learn from Sexton’s poem and create a society where individual women like Liza are liberated from the oppressive “rules for womanhood” so to speak that male chauvinists and third and fourth-wave feminists have created for them!
Although I obviously don't have direct experience of a woman's internal turmoil and external challenges, from my exterior point of view, I would say that the poem nails it, and your analysis of the poem also nails it. I do have some perspective on this, having been married for nearly 40 years (until her death in 2023) to a woman who acted as a lightning rod for every conceivable kind of condemnation, just by relentlessly being herself. Everything from being put into a mental institution because of her insistence that her father was abusing her (he was), up to and including rape, and a bunch of other stuff in between.
There was one incident that captured for me what she dealt with daily. I recall it not because of its magnitude but because of the pure, irreducible crystalline purity of its wrongness. We were out walking, and she gave a dollar to a panhandler. The man then thanked ME. We walked on a few paces, and she said simply, "see?"
I do have one technical remark to make about your analysis. I don't think that
"each of the poem’s three stanzas starts off with a traditional ABAB rhyme scheme and then diverges from it entirely, as if progressively undermining traditional norms through verse"
really supports that interpretation. The rhyme scheme in this poem is actually extremely tightly controlled, the rhymes are perfect (no slant rhymes at all) and every stanza adheres perfectly to ABABCBC. If the stanzas actually went off into wild unrhymed territory or changed to a scattered or fractured scansion after the initial perfectly metered ABAB, I agree that that would artistically indicate a breakage from traditional norms. The poem of course does break with norms thematically by presenting traditional views of women from angles that invite us to disavow them. I just don't think the versification supports that. YMMV, of course, but that's the way it looks to me.
I was delighted to wake up to this today. This is the poem that made me an Anne Sexton fan. The last two lines are goosebump worthy. I devoured this type of poetry in high school and it got me labeled the school "feminist." Really, I was just working on finding my own voice and it just so happened that Sexton, Didion, and other women of the '60s and '70s helped me find the courage to do so through their own works. There's a whitewashing of the past by a lot of people today who look to the '50s as a utopia for women due to the romanticization of the housewife archetype. If that's a woman's calling, that is beautiful. It's not every woman's calling. Those like Sexton worked hard to show that's okay too. I thank her for that, and for her radical honesty.
I was going to say, quite a few people might have been happy doing housework or boring outside-the-house work, but Sexton was a writer, so of course she wasn't.
Oh wow, you and Emily Baldo did such a wonderful job analyzing Anne Sexton’s amazing poem “Her Kind”, Liza! I had actually never heard of her until now. This is the kind of feminist poetry that I would enjoy reading and would actually make me think and help bridge the gap between men and women, unlike today’s social justice drek all about things like “toxic masculinity” and “white feminism” or bizarre musicals about the vagina or exhibits about period blood. This is what real feminism by a woman who actually suffered under second-class citizenship looks like. She speaks in this poem of the rigid gender expectations and gender roles placed on her and all her fellow women in the 20th Century and how despite the progress made, she still feels like very little has changed and women continued to be held back (which was undoubtedly true, this is why the Women’s Liberation Movement was needed). Sexton expresses frustration with all these qualities that are imposed on her despite them not being representative of her personality or who she really is because of her gender. I’ve seen the ideas discussed in Anne Sexton’s poems acted out in real life in Liza’s Instagram comments section. I remember seeing one commentor accuse Liza of being “the most pick me girl ever.” because she doesn’t like today’s feminist poetry, essentially saying she was a traitor to her gender. I also remember on another post Liza did at the beach where she was wearing a swimsuit top and tight fitting clothing a man commented that she was just doing this to get male attention. This comment is classic chauvinism and Liza responded by eloquently explaining that there a big difference between admiring a woman’s beauty and objectifying her. What these examples show is exactly what Sexton was trying to convey here. Liza as a woman is attacked by woke leftists for not acting the way they believe a woman should and by a sexist male pig for dressing too “sexy” for his liking and therefore she must just be looking for sex. 🤦♂️ As a woman she gets attacked from all sides including by other woman for not thinking, talking, acting, or dressing “as a woman should.” You know what I say? I say we learn from Sexton’s poem and create a society where individual women like Liza are liberated from the oppressive “rules for womanhood” so to speak that male chauvinists and third and fourth-wave feminists have created for them!
I believe that all women have progressed to be equal in most of modern life, but no all but a lot since the days of the witch trials
Although I obviously don't have direct experience of a woman's internal turmoil and external challenges, from my exterior point of view, I would say that the poem nails it, and your analysis of the poem also nails it. I do have some perspective on this, having been married for nearly 40 years (until her death in 2023) to a woman who acted as a lightning rod for every conceivable kind of condemnation, just by relentlessly being herself. Everything from being put into a mental institution because of her insistence that her father was abusing her (he was), up to and including rape, and a bunch of other stuff in between.
There was one incident that captured for me what she dealt with daily. I recall it not because of its magnitude but because of the pure, irreducible crystalline purity of its wrongness. We were out walking, and she gave a dollar to a panhandler. The man then thanked ME. We walked on a few paces, and she said simply, "see?"
I do have one technical remark to make about your analysis. I don't think that
"each of the poem’s three stanzas starts off with a traditional ABAB rhyme scheme and then diverges from it entirely, as if progressively undermining traditional norms through verse"
really supports that interpretation. The rhyme scheme in this poem is actually extremely tightly controlled, the rhymes are perfect (no slant rhymes at all) and every stanza adheres perfectly to ABABCBC. If the stanzas actually went off into wild unrhymed territory or changed to a scattered or fractured scansion after the initial perfectly metered ABAB, I agree that that would artistically indicate a breakage from traditional norms. The poem of course does break with norms thematically by presenting traditional views of women from angles that invite us to disavow them. I just don't think the versification supports that. YMMV, of course, but that's the way it looks to me.
I'm not familiar with the poetry of Anne Sexton.
Thank you for this. I will read more.
Wow. Great poem.