Success Quote by May Sarton

Perfection is the wrong god for an artist, and May Sarton quietly demotes it. "In a total work" sounds like a ledger balanced over a lifetime: not the clean arc of a single successful book or season, but the messy accumulation of attempts, revisions, detours, and outright misfires. Sarton’s phrasing is slyly corrective. She doesn’t romanticize failure as a badge or a teaching moment; she grants it a "place" - modest, structural, necessary - and insists it’s "not unimportant", that double negative doing the work of restraint. No pep talk, no triumphal narrative. Just the hard-won perspective of someone who kept making things.

The subtext is a defense against two modern pressures that artists know intimately: the market’s demand for a steady stream of hits, and the inner critic’s demand for an immaculate self. By locating failures inside the "total work", Sarton reframes them as part of coherence rather than evidence of inadequacy. A poem that doesn’t land, a novel that can’t find its form, even an abandoned draft becomes documentation of risk - proof that the artist didn’t stay safely within what already worked.

Context matters: Sarton’s career was long, prolific, and often judged through the narrow lenses of gender and genre, with her journals and poems sometimes treated as "minor" or overly intimate. This line pushes back. She’s arguing for the integrity of an oeuvre, where even the weaker pieces map the borders of ambition, and the whole is larger than its most quotable successes.