Home > Sarton Selected Summary & Study Guide

Sarton Selected (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

As the daughter of George Sarton, the great historian of science, and Mabel Elwes Sarton, the English artist, May Sarton enjoyed a childhood immensely rich in human exchange and intellectual stimulation. The bridge joining science and art that spanned her family became the archetype for her own development as a human being and writer. Her novels and poems throw out nets that gather in a wide variety of readers. She combines European and American sensibility, celebrates solitude and friendship, and has been praised for increasing understanding between the homosexual and heterosexual worlds.

This anthology bears witness to her literary range with a quiet but determined confidence—one could say, pride—in the self-evident power of her work. There is a long introduction by the editor entitled “May Sarton and the Common Reader’; the title implies the case for Sarton which the essay asserts, namely that she has outlasted the critics who confused her stunning simplicity with naivete and/or sentimentality by developing an unusually strong bond with her many readers from all walks of life. Another introductory essay follows, this one by Constance Hunting, which concentrates on Sarton’s poetry and makes much the same case for it as Daziel has for her work as a whole.

In a short essay, “Revision and Creation,” Sarton herself describes the essence of what poetic composition means to her. This is followed by a representative selection of her poems dating from the 1930’s to 1988. It is difficult to convey the rich variety of more than fifty years of highly crafted and limpid verse, much of it polished, poised, and stately, and all of it sonorously compassionate. The poems celebrate love and console every shade of grief imaginable; they are often fired with indignation against cruelty and injustice. As early as 1943, Sarton grieved over the race riots in Detroit with poetry that anticipates the awakened conscience of America some twenty-five years later. In many ways, May Sarton’s voice had something to do with bringing that awareness to life: “I reap now everything I let pass, let go./ This is the harvest of my own indifference.”

Sarton’s autobiographical writings, sketches, and journals reveal her remarkable gift for solitude, her talent for finding in nature and obscure people and moments food for intensely human meditation. Sarton’s fiction is as lyrical and compassionate as her poetry. Daziel wisely includes a long excerpt from A RECKONING (1978), a novel that has the courage to follow a dying woman’s thoughts, fears, and visions no matter where they lead and the insight and love to do all this without false pity or shallow piety.