[In the following review of The Lion and the Rose, Bacon comments favorably on Sarton's execution and expression.]

May Sarton is an artist of remarkable powers. She is one of those rare poets who, in making use of simple combinations of words—and of the words of our common speech at that—has achieved a vocabulary and style as distinctly her own as any poet now writing. As Lewis Carroll said, “It's a question of who shall be master.” In her case there is no question. She has drawn upon the whole stream of English literature to develop her subtle cadences and delicate, all-but-inaudible rhymes. One remembers the author of “I Sing of a Maiden,” and the most refined and expressive of the pre-Elizabethan poets. One wonders at the extreme simplicity of her statement (for such simplicity needs courage), and the more one wonders the more one is aware of the great gifts set forth in The Lion and the Rose. Here every part of a poem contributes to the whole. I have before me one entitled “The Clavichord,” a little marvel of interwoven syllables through which emerges a highly wrought subject, which is all the more interesting because the separate parts are wholly uncomplicated.

She keeps her clavichord
As others keep delight, too light
To breathe, the secret word
          No lover ever heard
Where the pure spirit lives
          And garlands weaves.

This book is a fine example of what an exquisite sense of form can give to contemporary verse, for it is full of pure poetry written by one who has not substituted correct ideas and enlightened opinions for a creative talent. By this I do not mean that the author's views are not of the most humane and advanced order. Any reader who will investigate “My Sisters, O My Sisters” or the group of poems describing the writer's impressions of Monticello and Winchester, Virginia, and the mansion of the cotton king at Natchez, Mississippi, will come away refreshed from contact with a mind so original and so sensitive. This book contains richness and color, landscapes of great variety, meditations upon age and youth, exequies and celebrations, a section of love poems of the most poignant character, mature and passionate, and the exalted symbolism of the title poem:

That in this death-in-life, delicate,
          cold,
The spiritual rose
Flower among the snows—
The love surpassing love.

The Lion and the Rose is an achievement of the first quality. Here is a writer who has let nothing escape her. Whatever life-images Miss Sarton chooses to turn into poetry become poetry. Her work is worth the admiring attention of everyone who considers himself a reader.