May Sarton Biography Quotes 21 Report mistakes

Early Life
May Sarton was born on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, near Ghent, Belgium, to the historian of science George Sarton and the English artist Eleanor Mabel Elwes Sarton, known as Mabel. When the First World War engulfed Belgium, the family fled to England and then to the United States, settling in the scholarly milieu of Cambridge, Massachusetts. George Sarton, a pioneer in the academic study of science and founder of the journal Isis, helped shape an intellectually rich household that valued books, inquiry, and disciplined work. Mabel Sarton, a painter and designer, imbued the home with the textures of art, color, and craft. An only child, May grew up between these complementary poles of rigor and imagination, influences that would remain visible in her writing across six decades.

Education and Early Career
Sarton attended schools in Cambridge and immersed herself in theater while still a teenager. She did not pursue a college degree, an unusual choice for someone raised in an academic atmosphere, but she was adamant about making her own apprenticeship in the arts. In New York in the late 1920s and early 1930s, she worked with Eva Le Gallienne and the Civic Repertory Theatre, learning the discipline of stagecraft and the exacting rhythms of language spoken aloud. The experience honed her ear and taught her about performance, audience, and the sustaining labor behind any artistic life. Although acting initially seemed her path, she soon turned toward poetry and fiction, recognizing that solitude at the desk suited her temperament better than the collaborative demands of the stage.

Emergence as a Poet and Novelist
Sarton published her first collection, Encounter in April, in 1937, marking the beginning of a substantial body of poetry that would explore love, solitude, creative vocation, and the consolations of the natural world. Inner Landscape (1939) affirmed her belief in poetry as a discipline of attention. Over the ensuing decades she brought out many volumes, careful with form but open to the immediacy of feeling, convinced that clarity and emotional candor could coexist. She also established herself as a novelist with books that probed ethical dilemmas and the interior lives of women. The Small Room (1961) examined power, mentorship, and integrity within an elite women's college. Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965) offered a bold portrait of an aging poet whose life and work openly include love between women, a subject that was still rarely treated with dignity in mainstream American fiction. Kinds of Love (1970) returned to small-town New England to consider community and change, while As We Are Now (1973) confronted aging and neglect through the eyes of a woman trapped in a rural nursing home.

Memoirs, Journals, and the Art of Solitude
Sarton's prose memoirs won her a wide readership beyond poetry. I Knew a Phoenix: Sketches for an Autobiography (1959) gathered portraits and episodes that traced her development. In 1958 she had settled in Nelson, New Hampshire, in a farmhouse that became both refuge and workshop; Plant Dreaming Deep (1968) evokes that house, the rigors of country living, and the centering rhythms of gardening and writing. Her best-known works are her journals, written with the immediacy of daily practice and published over many years. Journal of a Solitude (1973) records struggles with depression, the demands of correspondence, the joys and caretaking burdens of cats and gardens, and the tension between public attention and private necessity. The House by the Sea (1977) chronicled her later move to York, Maine, where the Atlantic and a new garden framed her days. Subsequent journals, including At Seventy (1984) and After the Stroke (1988), documented illness, recovery, and perseverance, turning the diary form into a sustained meditation on aging and creative survival.

Relationships, Community, and Influences
Although Sarton guarded aspects of her private life, she wrote with unflinching honesty about love between women and about the costs and rewards of living alone. Her candor helped readers navigate identity, partnership, and independence. The intellectual presence of George Sarton and the artistic sensibility of Mabel Sarton remained central touchstones, shaping her respect for discipline and craft. Early encouragement and example came from Eva Le Gallienne, whose seriousness about art validated Sarton's own ambitions. In midlife and later, important friendships sustained her, among them a long correspondence with the sculptor Anne Truitt, in which both artists tested ideas about form, fear, and endurance. In Maine, friends such as Harriet B. Hatfield provided companionship and practical support as Sarton's health faltered, helping her remain in the home and garden that mattered so much to her work. Through letters, readings, and campus visits, she built a community of readers and young writers who felt seen by her insistence that inner life is worthy of record.

Themes and Craft
Across genres, Sarton returned to a handful of elemental themes: the discipline of daily work, the paradox of solitude and connection, the integrity required of the artist, the complexity of women's friendships, and the experience of aging. Her sentences are lucid and musical, often anchored by the close observation of flowers, weather, light, and the coastal or New England landscapes in which she lived. She believed that careful attention to the ordinary could open onto the numinous. The journals, in particular, balance vulnerability with craft, transforming personal record into a communal space where readers find courage to face their own days. In fiction, she gave interiority to characters rarely granted it in mid-century American literature, especially older women and women loving women. In poetry, she remained faithful to form and cadence while insisting on directness of feeling.

Later Years and Final Work
From the 1970s onward, Sarton's reputation grew steadily among general readers, feminists, and LGBTQ audiences who recognized in her novels and journals a truthful rendering of lives too often marginalized. Health challenges, including a debilitating stroke in the 1980s, narrowed her physical range but did not silence her. After the Stroke attests to her refusal to sentimentalize illness; she wrote about fatigue, anger, and gratitude with the same attentive plainness that she brought to spring bulbs or snowfall. She continued to publish late poems and journals from her home in York, Maine, with the help of friends and devoted readers. Even as she faced limitations, she kept faith with the daily disciplines of writing and looking, finding in the garden and the sea a horizon for thought.

Legacy
May Sarton died in York, Maine, on July 16, 1995. She left a body of work that bridges poetry, fiction, and the intimate journal, and that invites readers into a conversation about how to build a life of integrity. The example of her parents, George and Mabel Sarton, her early formation under Eva Le Gallienne, and sustaining friendships such as that with Anne Truitt created a lattice of influence around which her independent voice could grow. For many, Sarton's books are a manual for living as an artist, a woman, and a person for whom solitude is both necessity and gift. Her pages continue to be passed from reader to reader, not only for insights about writing, love, and aging, but for their steady faith that careful attention to the world and to one's own interior life can hold meaning against time.

Our collection contains 21 quotes who is written by May, under the main topics: Ethics & Morality - Wisdom - Truth - Art - Love.

• May Sarton The work of happiness: A widely anthologized poem about finding joy in daily work, attention, and ordinary life.
• May Sarton loneliness: A central theme in Journal of a Solitude and many poems, contrasting creative solitude with isolation.
• May Sarton poems on aging: Coming into Eighty; Letters from Maine; late poems in Halfway to Silence; themes of elderhood and resilience.
• May Sarton books: Journal of a Solitude; Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing; As We Are Now; Plant Dreaming Deep; The House by the Sea; The Small Room.
• May Sarton famous poems: Now I Become Myself; The Work of Happiness; The Phoenix Again; The Muse as Medusa; A Light Left On.
• May Sarton Poems: Collected Poems 1930-1993; A Durable Fire; Halfway to Silence; A Private Myth; Letters from Maine; Coming into Eighty.
• How old was May Sarton? She became 83 years old

• 1973 Journal of a Solitude (Memoir)

• Wikipedia