manifested most intensely in the artist, who goes mad if he is unable to fulfill the need for balance. If the artist is a woman, however, she writes “at the expense of herself as a woman.” The woman writer, Sarton concludes, is by definition “aberrant.” Yet Sarton views such aberrance not as a liability but as an asset, a source of the woman writer’s unique creative power. In this respect, she takes issue with Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, who argue inThe Madwoman in the Attic (1979) that the woman who writes typically considers her gender a “painful obstacle” to be overcome and thus experiences an “anxiety of authorship.” According to Sarton’s schema, in contrast, the woman writer’s aberrance serves as a source of wholeness rather than schizophrenia, a constructive rather than a destructive force, for it catapults her not toward neurosis but toward health. Anxiety is especially acute in the creative woman, Sarton acknowledges, as are frustration, fragmentation, and rage; but these feelings of being “rent in two” are precisely the raw material from which female art is sculpted, the female self validated.

Once her aberrance is accepted as a given, Sarton believes, the woman writer can set about the process of self-discovery that lies at the root of meaningful art, especially of poetry. For Sarton, the inspiration for such discovery comes from the muse, that crucial force that “throws the artist back upon herself,” thereby facilitating an essential psychic exchange. In some respects, Sarton’s muse resembles the classic, passive inspirational source of the male poet, the traditional female lover: She is mysterious, she cannot be pinned down, she “goes her way.” As an alternate self to the woman poet, however, she also represents a vital, active aspect of the poetic process, a potent and often demoniac force against which the poet is constantly pitted. Like Plato, Sarton believes that creative energy is often a product of irrationality, “frenzy,” and that the primary source of this tumult is the “Honeyed muse.”

“My Sisters, O My Sisters”

Paralleling and complementing Sarton’s theory of female creativity is her poetry itself—more than half a century’s worth, written from the 1930’s to 1995. In several poems about the act of writing, she explores the ambivalence and power that inform the woman poet’s struggle for creative identity. Other poems refine and elaborate her view of the muse: as lover, “sister of the mirage and echo”; as demon, she of the “cold Medusa eyes”; and as mother, the core of life and art, “the never-ending/ the perfect tree.” The scope and nature of the female poetic process, for example, provide the theme of “My Sisters, O My Sisters,” an early poem in four parts.

In the first section, the poet discusses the difficulties the woman artist faces in her movement from silence to speech. As “strange monsters,” a breed apart, Sarton alleges, women writers must set aside traditional female passivity, “the treasures of our silence,” to uncover the “curious devouring pleasure” of creativity. Such sacrifices are often problematical, the poet admits, and she offers a catalog of “aberrant” women writers to support her argument: George Sand, who “loved too much”; Madame de Staël, “too powerful for men”; Madame de Sevigny, “too sensitive.” Yet only through the self-imposed renunciation of traditional roles, she suggests, have authentic and autonomous female voices emerged: Emily Dickinson, who renounced society so that her art might flourish; Sappho, whose writing fed on “the extremity of spirit and flesh.” The contemporary woman writer, Sarton continues, has much to learn from her forebears’ attempts to break out of the prison of silence.

In the second stanza, Sarton defines “that great sanity, that sun, the feminine power” as a revaluation of qualities typically associated with woman: fecundity, nurture, love. These “riches,” which have heretofore sustained men and children, the poet continues, “these great powers/ which are ours alone,” must now be used by women to fertilize their own creativity. As a model of the precarious balance for which women must strive, Sarton offers two biblical foremothers: Eve, the purveyor of female speech and knowledge; and Mary, giver of love and maternal nurture. The poet’s complex task is to assimilate and affirm both branches of this full-bodied tree.

In the final section, Sarton submits female creativity, woman’s solitary art, as a means of “re-joining the source” and thus attaining balance and clarity of vision. Taking to task herself and other women who have “asked so little of ourselves and men/ And let the Furies have their way,” the poet calls on her fellow women writers to claim as their own the “holy fountain” of creative imagination, transforming it into a wellspring of feminine song. Only by appropriating the “masculine” power of creation, the poet suggests, can women “come home to this earth,” giving birth from its inner recesses to themselves as artists and as women, “fully human.” “That great sanity . . . feminine power” will become a reality, Sarton concludes, when women “match men’s greatness” with their own great works of art.

“Poets and the Rain”

Although “My Sisters, O My Sisters” is Sarton’s most overtly feminist poem, other works also describe the woman poet’s efforts to assert a vital, autonomous voice. This struggle provides the underlying dialectic of “Poets and the Rain,” which addresses the problem of poetic stasis and subsequent rejuvenation. In the first stanza, the poet-persona is debilitated by the rain, which reflects her own inertia and despair; she speaks not as an active creator but as a passive receptacle for the words of others. “I will lie here alone and live your griefs,” she declares. “I will receive you, passive and devout.” Yet as she offers such disclaimers, the poet hears her own creative instincts stirring, faint but intelligible. Plagued by the “strange tides” running through her head, she distinguishes three voices, each of which presents her with a different vision of life and art. The first “singer” is an old man who “looks out and taunts the world, sick of mankind,” in a voice “shriller than all the rest.” In an interesting reversal of a stereotype, Sarton associates shrillness not with a hysterical “feminine” voice but with a “masculine” cry of pessimism and derision. Although part of her sympathizes with this doomsday prophet, she ultimately rejects the model that he offers. She will “dream a hunting song to make the old hawk scream,” but she is not sufficiently moved by the old man’s “bird-scream” to adopt such a voice herself.

Contrasted to this male voice are two female speakers whose visions, when combined, posit a more balanced and optimistic stance. The first woman represents the traditional female voice, that of nurturer, comforter, inspirer. Touched by the love that this woman’s song exudes, the poet is inspired to “weave” her own “simple song”—to become, that is, herself a voice of feminine wisdom and maternal love. Despite the strong appeal of this choice, however, it is not enough for the creative woman: The singer is “frustrate”; her purity and nest-building are essentially passive postures. Despite her connection with the traditional female arts, or perhaps because of it, this woman’s song is too simple and static a model for the poet.

The speaker is most moved by the “blurred” yet potent voice of a “great girl, the violent and strong,” who asks “deep questions in her difficult song.” This description recalls Denise Levertov’s celebration in “In Mind” of a “turbulent moon-ridden girl . . . who knows strange songs”; or Louise Bogan’s “The Dream,” in which a “strong creature . . . another woman” leaps and shouts until her passive counterpart is prodded into life-saving speech and action. In Sarton’s poem, the girl’s “deep questions” and “difficult song” as well as her fierce commitment to her art and her beliefs offer the questing poet her most inspirational model. Although she realizes the difficulties inherent in such a vision, the persona determines that her voice, like the great girl’s, will emerge from an emotional and intellectual complex, a “labyrinth of mind.” At last, “rapt with delight,” the poet recites her poem, “leaves of a tree/ Whose roots are hidden deep in mystery.”

“Journey Toward Poetry”

The special danger inherent in the woman poet’s effort to “speak aloud” is also the subject of “Journey Toward Poetry.” The poet’s ordering of her imaginative experience, Sarton suggests, is analogous to a dangerous journey across foreign yet somehow familiar terrain, a haunting interior journey that produces ultimately for the chary traveler the ideal word or image or perspective. For Sarton, such a poetic voyage usually begins in anger, chaos, and concentrated violence. An array of intense and disturbingly surrealistic images accompanies the “beautiful mad exploration” that is poetry: hills winding and unwinding on a spool, rivers running away from their beds, geraniums bursting open to reveal “huge blood-red cathedrals,” “marble graveyards” falling into the sea. One is reminded of William Butler Yeats’s “blood-dimmed tide”: “the center cannot hold,” Sarton implies, when the imagination runs unchecked.

Yet the center does hold. Once the poet’s errant imagination is stayed, her inner landscapes soften, become more pastoral. From disorder, to paraphrase Wallace Stevens, emerges a violent order, a silent stillness “where time not motion changes light to shadow.” “Journey Toward Poetry” thus serves as Sarton’s metaphoric depiction of the poetic process, fraught with danger for any poet, but intensely so for the woman. Beginning in rage or anxiety, at “white heat,” the poet’s mad racing ultimately gives way to that fruitful ripening of image and idea that inform the “birth of creation.” Out of the stillness and solitude that inevitably follow the poet-terrorist’s “mad exploration,” the “composed imagination” transfigures the ordinary into the extraordinary.

“These Images Remain”

For Sarton, such transfigurations are inspired by a female muse who appears in one of three manifestations: the erotic, the demoniac, or the maternal. In her maternal guise, the muse is sometimes a human lover-visitant, sometimes a goddess or mythological figure. One recurring muse-figure is Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and sexuality who is also linked to ancient Eastern mother-goddesses, such as Ishtar, Isis, and Astarte. Because her powers are both matriarchal and sexual, Sarton often envisages Aphrodite as a primordial goddess of fecundity, “one who holds the earth between her knees.” Such a goddess informs “These Images Remain,” an early sonnet sequence in which the poet confronts the sexual tension at the heart of the poet-muse relationship. As the epitome of female beauty and eroticism, Aphrodite inspires Sarton to acknowledge her own creative capacity; thus she acts as both muse and mirror for the poet. Yet the “silent consummation” between poet and muse is as precarious as quicksand, Sarton suggests in the fifth sonnet; any union with Aphrodite must be transitory. The poet imagines herself as a sculptor whose creation grows “out of deprivation . . . a self-denying rage,” evoked by the longing that accompanies any interaction with the muse. Never will the muse be possessed, the poet realizes, but it is the effort to possess that results in the “masculine and violent joy of pure creation,” in the sculptor’s lasting images, “great and severe.”

“The Return of Aphrodite”

In “The Return of Aphrodite,” Sarton describes another encounter with the erotic muse, here a “guiltless” goddess who advances “tranquil and transparent,/ To lay on mortal flesh her sacred mantle.” The notion of transparency is central to Sarton’s view of the muse as an extension of the self, a Medusa through whose eyes one can gaze on one’s mirror image. Unlike the poet’s confrontations with Medusa, however, her exchange with Aphrodite is depicted in images of joy and tranquillity. The imagery also is richly erotic: As the mortal poet receives the goddess’s “sacred mantle,” the “green waves part,” only to recede at once after the consummation, leaving in their wake a faint “stain” of light.

“A Divorce of Lovers”

The muse for Sarton also appears as a demoniac force with which the poet must reckon. Especially in poems about the demise of a relationship and the subsequent loss of creative energy, the muse appears as a fury who must be acknowledged and conquered. In the fourth sonnet of “A Divorce of Lovers,” for example, Sarton accuses her lover of “chasing out the furies and the plagues of passion” rather than confronting them. In awe of these demons, the poet is nevertheless aware of the need for such “ghosts.” When angels and furies “fly so near,” she continues, “they come to force Fate at a crucial pass.” This forcing of Fate, in turn, opens up an essential dialogue with the self that ultimately allows the poet to transform her violence and rage into creative energy.

“The Godhead as Lynx”

In some poems, Sarton replaces angels and furies with animals, powerful forces that must be accepted and assimilated rather than denied or tamed. In “The Godhead as Lynx,” for example, the poet gleans nourishment from the power of the beautiful yet cold mother-lynx, “Kyrie Eleison.” The poet portrays herself as a child transfixed and transfigured by the “absolute attention” that informs the lynx’s “golden gaze.” Sarton often uses the metaphor of face-to-face confrontation to dramatize the dialogue between poet and muse; here the speaker, though only a child, challenges the lynx by meeting her “obsidian eyes.” Rather than fearing confrontation and dreading its aftermath, the speaker undertakes such an experience on her own terms. She abandons her pride and rage before the lynx, a necessary gesture, Sarton implies, if the child is to rejoin the mother, the human to encounter the divine.

Sarton goes on to envision the lynx as a “prehuman” maternal goddess into whose womb the poet-daughter is tempted to crawl. Like ancient goddesses, however, the lynx is linked with both creation and destruction. Despite the strong appeal of her “essential fur,” her maternal comfort, she lacks compassion; she is cruel, “lightning to cut down the lamb,/ A beauty that devours without qualm.” In her dual guise as beneficent and demoniac, therefore, the lynx evokes in the poet an ambivalent response: She is both appealing and frightening, and thus the tension with which the speaker approaches the powerful creature can be used for good or for ill. Through her encounter with the godhead as lynx, the poet’s own strength is unleashed. She is forced to grow, at times to groan, but always to think in ways heretofore unknown.

“The Muse as Medusa”

The demoniac muse whom Sarton most often invokes is Medusa, the mythological “monster” whose hair writhed with serpents, whose glance turned men to stone. Because Medusa could be viewed only indirectly and because of the mystery and danger associated with her powers, she symbolizes the woman poet’s struggle with herself for herself, thus serving as both a source and a manifestation of female creativity. In “The Muse as Medusa,” Sarton describes an encounter with this fury, meeting Medusa as she has met the lynx: one-on-one, “straight in the cold eye, cold.” Despite her “nakedness” and vulnerability, the poet challenges the Medusa myth by transforming the legendary monster from a debilitating force to a source of creative rejuvenation. Medusa’s stony gaze does not destroy; it transfigures, by “clothing” the naked speaker in the warm, protective garment of thought. “Forget the image,” Sarton exults, for this Medusa renews through the paradoxical vitality of her silent presence. “Your silence is my ocean,” the poet tells Medusa, “and even now it teems with life.”

Yet Medusa herself is not the power responsible for such teeming life; this motion continues in spite of, rather than because of, her presence. Medusa, after all, “chose/ To abdicate by total lack of motion,” and abdicating is something the speaker refuses to do. Instead, Sarton creates a fluid seascape of which Medusa is merely a part, her destructive fury put to use. In remaking Medusa in her own image, the poet acknowledges a vital female creativity and affirms the demoniac part of herself. Medusa’s face is her face, Sarton realizes; the monster’s rage emerges from the poet’s own “secret, self-enclosed, and ravaged place.” As the poem ends, the poet thanks Medusa for her powerful “gift.”

“An Invocation to Kali”

In one of her most provocative poems about female inspiration, “An Invocation to Kali,” Sarton depicts the muse as both demon and mother, affirming the close connections that she perceives among demoniac rage, maternal love, and female creativity. The poem opens with an epigraph from Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God (1959), a description of “the Black Goddess Kali, the terrible one of so many names.” As an aspect of the woman’s creative self, Kali is both inspiring and threatening. Her dual powers intrigue the poet, arousing her envy and admiration; yet an identification with Kali also evokes shame, anger, and fear—that peculiar blend of self-love and self-loathing of one who is both trapped and freed by her art. In section 1, Sarton sets forth this poem’s central issue: how best to cope with the demands of the “Black Goddess.” A “voracious animal,” the Kali within is a violent force whose “brute power” arouses in the poet both apprehension and guilt. Ambivalent toward this potent but demoniac force, the poet recognizes and fears its potential for debilitation and entrapment: “I am the cage where/ Poetry paces and roars.” What then to do with Kali? the poet wonders. Is she to be murdered or lived with?

Section 2 suggests the futility of any effort to kill the goddess; the anguish and rage which this “terrible one” promulgates is too awesome to be negated easily. Instead, the poet asserts, Kali “must have her hour.” If the demon is denied, Sarton suggests, she will continue to inflict her bloody reign, but if she is faced “open-eyed,” her explosive rage will be revealed for what it is: an emotion essential if creativity is to flourish. For every act of creation, Sarton insists, is preceded by destruction; “every creation is born out of the dark.” Unless Kali does her “sovereign work,” the poet continues, “the living child will be stillborn.”

In the third and fourth sections, Sarton expands the image of Kali as a metaphor for the extreme social violence that has plagued Western culture, especially during the twentieth century. “The Concentration Camps” is packed with gruesome images depicting the tragic results of humanity’s efforts to deny its furies, to pretend that violence and existential “dis-ease” do not exist. “Have we managed to fade them out like God?” the poet asks of Hitler’s most poignant victims, children. In “turning away” from the “stench of bones,” people have “tried to smother” fires that need desperately to burn, as vital reminders of what happens when violence is repressed and then unleashed. All are guilty, Sarton’s indictment implies; refusing to meet demons is both a cultural and an individual sickness.

In Sarton’s view, the solution to this widespread ailment is “to reckon with Kali for better or worse,” to accept her violence as an essential purging force. Thus the poet turns to the goddess’s sacred altar, offering her final invocation to this “terrible one.” “Help us to bring darkness into the light,” she begs, to see anger and pain in a new way, as “the balance-wheel for our vulnerable, aching love.” Only by confronting the Kali within, she believes, can the poet become a “gardener of the spirit,” thereby claiming the goddess’s “awesome power” as her own.

“Of the Muse”

Whether she appears as an erotic, a demoniac, or a maternal force, the female muse serves for Sarton as a key image by which to depict the woman poet’s struggle for voice and autonomy. The intense encounter with the muse forces the poet to come to terms with her own power of creativity. This confrontation, in turn, leads the poet closer to the balanced, integrated state that Sarton posits as an ideal. In “Of the Muse,” the final poem of Halfway to Silence, Sarton offers a powerful and moving assessment of her creative philosophy. Poetry comes not from lies, she insists, but from a “crude honesty” that makes the poet “a great, cracked,/ Wide-open door/ Into nowhere.” When young, she continues, the muse was beyond her comprehension, but now she is grateful for her as one is grateful for light. This poem suggests a new direction for Sarton in its emphasis on the link between poetry and honesty, an area of particular concern to many contemporary feminist theorists and women poets.

Women and writers have often been praised for lying, Adrienne Rich declares in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence (1979). Yet the unconscious, like the body, struggles for truth, Rich continues, and “the complexity and fecundity of poetry comes from the same struggle.” Rich’s statement might well be Sarton’s, so accurately does it describe the theory implicit in “Of the Muse.” Fighting to fulfill its desire for truth, Sarton suggests, along with Rich, the woman poet’s “fecund and complex” unconscious is awakened to vital insights and potent speech through her dialogue with that self who is also the muse. Once “misunderstood” as something to be subdued and conquered, the muse is now recognized by the aging poet as a force most closely analogous to light. “We do not thank the light,” Sarton explains, “but rejoice in what we see/ Because of it.” What she sees is the “crude” but honest power of poetry, its transformative potential. Through the muse, the poet concludes “all things are made new.”

Letters from Maine

Letters from Maine continues this emphasis on the female muse by celebrating love and creative inspiration in old age. In the title work, a sequence of ten sonnet-like poems, Sarton pays homage to a “November muse” who brings her wisdom, clarity, and laughter. Although the poet and her lover-muse eventually separate, the force of her inspiration remains despite the poet’s sense of loss: “everything stops but the poem.” To encounter the muse as an aging woman poet seems to Sarton a special but difficult gift. In Poem 6 she recalls a Nootka Indian legend about a “Primal Spirit,” an old woman whom she greets, “deep inside myself,” whenever she feels bereft: “Under the words you are my silence.” The last poem in the sequence reveals Sarton’s struggle to write against all odds, even when the muse appears as Medusa, playing “cruel games.” Despite frequent obstacles, the poet expresses confidence in the reliability of her art.

The interwoven themes of creativity and aging recur in two poignant poems near the end of “Letters to Myself,” the final section of Letters from Maine. In the first, Sarton acknowledges a “terrible fear, the fear of feeling” which besets her as she strives to write. Although the poet recognizes her capacity for self-healing, she relies as well on “the dark angel and silent charm,” her muse, to lead her from despair to hope. Through poetry, Sarton asserts in the second poem, one encounters one’s deepest self and thereby is changed. Such transformations anticipate the final transformation caused by death itself. The poem ends with a statement of the poet’s complex goal: “to sustain tension, yet discover poise,/ For this Magnificat of severe joys.”

The Silence Now

The Silence Now contains new and uncollected earlier poems, several of which reveal an ongoing concern with the perils and pleasures of silence, a theme central to Sarton’s work and that of many other modern women poets. The title poem claims that silence is immense, a realization that motivates the poet to question what it signifies: “At the bottom of the silence what lies in wait?” Sarton responds to her own question by evoking images of transience from the natural world—dying daffodils, irises almost open, clouds moving rapidly as the sky clears. Such visionary, silent encounters with the world of nature, “moments of pure joy,” move the poet as deeply as does the practice of her art.

Two poems about her mother suggest the powerful influence this inspirational figure had on her poet-daughter. In “Dream,” Sarton finds herself “inside my mother’s death,” unable to breathe and struggling to break out of the imprisoning tomb. Despite her horror, she realizes that she could never emerge from the tomb without her mother, for their lives are entangled, “twice-born mystery/ where the roots intertwine.” Sarton recognizes the complexity of mother-daughter symbiosis and, finally, experiences it as liberating; when the speaker awakens, she is free.

“August Third” commemorates Sarton’s mother on her birthday, as the aging poet recalls her elderly parent’s “inexhaustible flame.” Mabel Sarton certainly experienced fatigue, her daughter declares, but she knew how to push it aside to tend lilies in the early morning. In this poem’s moving final stanzas, Sarton calls on her mother for life energy and sustenance: “Mother, be with me.” Sarton realizes that she is now older than her mother was when she died, an awareness that somehow gives her strength to greet a new day. From her maternal muse the poet has learned a vital lesson, “never to fail life.”

Coming into Eighty

Sarton’s final collection, Coming into Eighty was published only a year before her death and is a meditation on the meaning of old age, unaccustomed limitations, and anticipations of mortality. The everyday activities of the old person, taken for granted by those of younger generations, are highlighted and dramatized here, in curt lines that imitate the conservation of energy and snippets of memory typical of old age: “These days,” she informs us, “Everything is an effort, . . ./ An adventure.” The poems therefore capture the nexus between the sublime and the mundane—the “effort” and the “adventure,” or the “Muse” that, like her cat, “Mews.” The poet becomes enthralled by even the most common daily sensations, “Alive to every stir of a leaf,” which in turn reinforce her own, still living, state. These are the experiences, sharply focused, that move her, and us, on a “slowing ship,” a “last mysterious voyage,” toward a final destination.