Life & Wisdom Quote by May Sarton

Articulation is usually treated like a moral good: clearer speech, cleaner thinking, better person. Sarton flips that comfort. For a poet, words aren’t neutral tools; they’re loaded instruments. The better you are at using them, the more force you can apply and the less visible the force becomes.

The intent here isn’t anti-intellectual so much as anti-innocence. An articulate person can persuade, seduce, flatter, and rationalize with a finesse that makes harm feel like insight. Precision can become a scalpel: it heals, it also cuts. Sarton's line quietly warns that verbal skill increases responsibility because it expands the range of outcomes your language can produce. You can name what others can’t, and that power destabilizes rooms, relationships, even self-concepts.

The subtext is personal as much as political. In Sarton’s work, the inner life is not a decorative theme; it’s the main terrain, and language is the method of excavation. But excavation damages what it exposes. To articulate a grief, a desire, a resentment is to change it, and to change your relationship to the people implicated by it. Saying the exact thing can end a marriage, liberate a friend, puncture a lie, or harden a private feeling into a public fact.

Context matters: Sarton wrote across decades when women’s speech was often policed as either too emotional or too unfeminine, and poets were expected to turn experience into consumable beauty. Her warning doubles as a refusal of that innocence. If you can speak clearly, you can’t pretend you didn’t know what you were doing.