May Sarton

May Sarton – Life, Career, and Enduring Voice

Explore the life, work, and wisdom of May Sarton. From diaries to poetry, discover her struggles, insights, famous quotes, and the lessons her intimate writing offers readers today.

Introduction

May Sarton (born Eleanore Marie Sarton; May 3, 1912 – July 16, 1995) was a prolific Belgian-American poet, novelist, memoirist, and diarist whose deeply introspective work charts the inner life, solitude, creativity, love, aging, and self-discovery.

Though for much of her career critics overlooked her, in later decades feminist scholars and readers of spiritual, confessional writing have come to recognize her as a significant figure in American literature.

In what follows, we trace her origins, her creative path, her thematic concerns, sample her memorable lines, and reflect on lessons from her life and writing.

Early Life and Family

May Sarton was born on May 3, 1912, in Wondelgem, Belgium (now part of Ghent). Eleanore Marie Sarton.

Her father, George Sarton, was a historian of science and scholar; her mother, Mabel Eleanor Elwes, was an English artist.

During World War I, as Germany invaded Belgium, her family fled first to England and then (circa 1915–16) immigrated to the United States, settling in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where her father held an academic position.

Sarton spent her formative years in Massachusetts, attending local schools. She graduated from Cambridge Latin High School in 1929.

She early on felt drawn to both theatre and writing: she studied drama, worked with theater groups (notably Eva Le Gallienne’s Civic Repertory Theatre in New York) for a time, but always maintained her poetic and journal practice.

Her dual heritage—Belgian birth, American upbringing—along with her intellectual and artistic household, provided her with a cosmopolitan sensibility and a sensitivity to inner and outer identity.

Creative Career & Major Works

Early Publications & Literary Range

Over her lifetime, Sarton published about 53 books, including 17 volumes of poetry, numerous novels, essays, journals/memoirs, and even works for children.

Her early poetry appeared as early as the late 1920s and 1930s; her first volume Encounter in April was published in 1937.

She never confined herself to one genre: Sarton moved fluidly between poetry, fiction, personal journals, and critical writing.

Journals & Memoirs: Her Signature Voice

Although she produced many works, Sarton’s journals and memoirs are among her most enduring and admired writings. In these, she writes frankly about solitude, creative struggle, health, love, aging, identity, and loss.

Some of her most notable journal works include:

• Plant Dreaming Deep (covering her years at Nelson, New Hampshire)

• Journal of a Solitude (1972–1973), often considered a signature work in her canon

• The House by the Sea (1974–1976)

• Recovering (1978–1979)

• At Seventy (1982–83)

• Later journals Endgame (1992), Encore (1993), and Coming Into Eighty (published posthumously) reflect her experience of aging, illness, and gratitude.

These journals resonate deeply with readers who seek a literary “companion” voice—someone who voices doubts, small joys, inner battles, and the slow unfolding of self.

Themes & Style

Sarton’s writing style is often described as calm, urbane, introspective, and intimately observant.

Her works frequently explore:

• Solitude versus loneliness. She draws a careful distinction: solitude may nourish the self, while loneliness wounds it.

• The life of creativity and self-doubt. She often speaks of how writing is not always flowing, how blocks, weariness, and existential questions haunt the artist.

• Aging, mortality, illness. Later journals engage more directly with physical decline, loss, and the meaning of later life.

• Identity, love, relationships, sexuality. Sarton lived for many years in a lesbian relationship with Judy Matlack; though she resisted being labeled a “lesbian writer,” her personal life informs many of her reflections.

• Nature, ordinary beauty, renewal. She often returns to images of gardens, seasons, flowers, light, and letting go.

Over time, critics and feminist scholars reclaimed her work as a key voice in women’s writing, queer literature, and spiritual literature.

Later Life & Health Challenges

In her later years, Sarton suffered health setbacks. In 1990, she suffered a stroke that impaired her writing; she adapted by using a tape recorder to dictate journals.

Despite illness and advancing age, she continued writing, traveling, and reflecting—her later journals (Endgame, Encore, Coming Into Eighty) chronicle her resilience, gratitude, and struggle with mortality.

She died on July 16, 1995, in York, Maine, from complications related to breast cancer.

Her papers are preserved in collections such as the May Sarton Collection (University of New England) and the New York Public Library.

Famous Quotes by May Sarton

Here are several enduring quotations that capture the spirit of her voice:

• “We have to dare to be ourselves, however frightening or strange that self may prove to be.”

• “Loneliness is the poverty of self; solitude is richness of self.”

• “Does anything in nature despair except man? An animal with a foot caught in a trap does not seem to despair. It is too busy trying to survive.”

• “I think of the trees and how simply they let go, let fall the riches of a season … Imitate the trees. Learn to lose in order to recover, and remember nothing stays the same for long, not even pain.”

• “If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be?”

• “Poetry is first of all a way of life and only secondarily a way of writing.”

• “Without darkness, nothing comes to birth, as without light, nothing flowers.”

• “The more articulate one is, the more dangerous words become.”

Each of these lines exhibits her blend of clarity, emotional honesty, and contemplative depth.

Lessons from May Sarton's Life & Work

1. Embrace solitude, but recognize its tension.
   For Sarton, solitude was a creative necessity—but also a terrain fraught with fear, loneliness, and inner reckoning.

2. Vulnerability is strength.
   She often writes of self-doubt, grief, illness—not hiding weakness, but showing how it shapes voice and meaning.

3. Creativity is a life practice, not just occasional performance.
   Her journals reveal that writing is as much about sustaining attention, patience, and alignment as it is about inspiration.

4. Letting go is part of regeneration.
   Her imagery of trees releasing leaves or seasons shifting is a recurrent metaphor for acceptance, loss, and renewal.

5. Remain true to self beyond labels.
   Sarton resisted reductive labels (e.g. “lesbian writer”) and sought to speak of universal human longing while bringing her particular self fully into the work.

6. Age and decline can still yield insight and grace.
   Her later journals are not despairing but engaged—with gratitude, curiosity, and reckoning with mortality.

Conclusion

May Sarton’s life and work open a space for readers who seek a companion in the quiet hours—the one who articulates inner storms, the slow turning of seasons, and the paradox of solitude as both gift and trial. Her voice does not seek grand gestures; it listens, hesitates, breathes, and finally, speaks what matters.