In 1960, at the beginning of her rise to prominence, Sexton wrote "Her Kind," a controlled three-stanza confessional that concluded To Bedlam and Part Way Back. The poem illustrates the author's immersion in a New England tradition, the roundup of hapless females to be tormented and executed during the Salem witch persecutions. In one of the poet's characteristic split personalities, through a double first-person presentation, she merges consciousness with a subversive, energized woman shunned by the pious as she is hunted for witchcraft. The loosely structured four-beat lines follow a rhyme scheme of ababcdc, linked by mostly monosyllabic end words. Each stanza concludes with the markedly forthright three-beat iambic refrain, "I have been her kind," which names her jazz ensemble, Anne Sexton and Her Kind. Images of darkness and freakishness dominate the first stanza, which stresses a compulsion to roam outside the confines of civility. The dual-natured character is both witch and violator of the domestic womanhood that inhabits the "plain houses" below.
Lonely and driven, the speaker ranges beyond civilization to surprisingly inviting caverns, where she fills the warm emptiness with a rat pack of possessions. Arranged on orderly shelves are oddments derived from past episodes of eccentricity and madness. Like good children, her companions, worms and elves, eat her suppers. Innately "disaligned," they submit to reshaping, a personal reference to Sexton's organic poetry and failed attempts of psychological analysis and treatment with Thorazine. At the end of the stanza, she defends the speaker as "misunderstood," a defense of her own erratic behaviors.
