Poetry finds its perilous equilibrium somewhere between music and speech. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
Poems like to have a destination for their flight. They are homing pigeons. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
Try making a poem as if it were a table, clear and solid, standing there outside you. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
It is clear that we do not exactly choose our poems; our poems choose us. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I write poems, have always written them, to transcend the painfully personal and reach the universal. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I have written every poem, every novel, for the same purpose-to find out what I think, to know where I stand. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I cannot understand why poetry is not taught at schools as a way of seeing, a quick, untiring path to essentials. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
The poet must be free to love or hate as the spirit moves him, free to change, free to be a chameleon,… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I am furious at all the letters to answer, when all I want to do is think and write poems. ... I… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
In poetry compromise is fatal. In action of any cooperative sort it is inevitable. The thing is to find the balance. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
The beginner hugs his infant poem to him and does not want it to grow up. But you may have to break… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I feel often very close to the ecstasy and anguish which lie at the very heart of poetry - I am writing… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
Why should it happen that among the great many women whom I see and am fond of, suddenly somebody I meet for… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
For poetry exists to break through to below the level of reason where the angels and monsters that the amenities keep in… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
The fact is that I have lived with the belief that power, any kind of power, was the one thing forbidden to… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
For poetry is, I believe, always an act of the spirit. The poem teaches us something while we make it. The poem… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
“There are some griefs so loud They could bring down the sky, And there are griefs so still None knows how deep… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
Poetry is a dangerous profession between conflict and resolution, between feeling and thought, between becoming and being, between the ultra-personal and the… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
... the reason why there are so few first-class poets is that many people have intense feelings or first-class minds but to… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
over and over again I am struck by the wordiness of modern poetry, as if language had replaced experience and must be… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
One thing is certain, and I have always known it - the joys of my life have nothing to do with age.… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
“I loved them in the way one loves at any age — if it’s real at all — obsessively, painfully, with wild… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
“When I was young and knew Virginia Woolf slightly, I learned something that startled me—that a person may be ultrasensitive and not… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
For me a true poem is on the way when I begin to be haunted, when it seems as if I were… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
“And now we who are writing women and strange monsters Still search our hearts to find the difficult answers, Still hope that… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
When one's not writing poems - and I'm not at the moment - you wonder how you ever did it. It's like… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I’m only able to write poetry, for the most part, when I have a Muse, a woman who focuses the world for… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I write poems about relationships, love relationships, and I'm not able to do that all the time. I could go two years… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
It is dangerous it seems to me for a civilization when there is a complete abyss betewen people in general and the… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
One could go on revising a prose page forever whereas there is a point in a poem when one knows it is… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
In the novel or the journal you get the journey. In a poem you get the arrival. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
“I felt pain like an assault, The old pain again When the world thrusts itself inside, When we have to take in the outside,… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
This suspension of one's own reality, this being entirely alone in a strange city (at times I wondered if I had lost the power… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
Real joy is becoming exceedingly rare among artists of any kind. And I have an idea that those who can and do communicate it… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
For to be desperate is to discover strength. / We die of comfort and by conflict live. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
“I see you with that shell Held to your sensitive abstracted ear, Hunting the ocean’s rumor till you hear it well, Until you can… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
There is a wilder solitude in winter When every sense is pricked alive and keen. — May Sarton Copy Share Image
I long for the bulbs to arrive, for the early autumn chores are melancholy, but the planting of bulbs is the work of hope… — May Sarton Copy Share Image
Why is it that people who cannot show feeling presume that that is a strength and not a weakness? — May Sarton Copy Share Image
Innocence is not pure so much as pleased, Always expectant, bright-eyed, self-enclosed — May Sarton Copy Share Image
