Life & Wisdom Quote by May Sarton

Sarton is daring you to stop treating biography as a master key. “May we agree” has the tone of a dinner-table provocation, but it’s also a quiet defensive move from a poet who lived in an era eager to turn a woman’s interior life, loves, and solitude into the headline. Call private life “irrelevant” and you reclaim the right to be read for the work rather than inspected for evidence.

The sentence structure enacts her argument. “Multiple, mixed, ambiguous at best” tumbles forward like lived experience itself: messy, overlapping, resistant to tidy narrative. Then comes the counterforce: “we try to fashion.” Art isn’t a diary dump; it’s an act of compression and will. The phrase “crystal clear” is doing double duty: it praises the achieved clarity of a poem while admitting that clarity is manufactured, not discovered. “The singular, the absolute” sounds almost theological, a reminder that poems often borrow the authority of certainty even when the poet knows life won’t supply it.

Subtext: the relevant self isn’t the one caught in scandal sheets or confessional trivia; it’s the self made through form. Sarton is also naming a bargain artists make with their own contradictions: you don’t resolve them in life, you transmute them on the page. Context matters here: mid-century literary culture, especially around women and queer writers, loved to reduce work to “private” explanations. Sarton flips the hierarchy. The private may be the raw material, but relevance is the finished object - the crafted absolutes we can share, argue with, and live alongside.