The first poetry workshop she attended was led by John Holmes. Sexton felt great trepidation about registering for the class, asking a friend to make the phone call and accompany her to the first session. She found early acclaim with her poetry; a number were accepted by "The New Yorker", "Harper's Magazine" and the "Saturday Review". Sexton later studied with Robert Lowell at Boston University alongside poets Sylvia Plath and George Starbuck. Sexton later paid homage to her friendship with Plath in the 1966 poem "Sylvia's Death". Her first volume of poetry, "To Bedlam and Part Way Back", was published in 1960, and included the poem "Her Kind", which uses the persecution of witches as an analogy for the oppression of women in a patriarchal society.