May Sarton Critical Essay | May Sarton

Critical Review by Andrea Lockett

SOURCE: "Strange Monsters," in Belles Lettres: A Review of Books by Women, Vol. 9, No. 3, July, 1994, p. 37.

[In the following review, Lockett offers praise for Sarton's Collected Poems (1930–1993).]

Even the most devout reader of May Sarton's work may be relatively unfamiliar with her poetry. But Sarton, who has published 16 volumes of verse to date, considers herself a poet first and foremost. Thus, Collected Poems (1930–1993) is essential reading.

Carolyn G. Heilbrun on Sarton's fidelity to the conventions of genre:

Little has so marked contemporary literature as the melding of genres. Once the "certainties" of a steadier time were revealed to rest upon arguable assumptions, the slippage of genre was inevitable. Today biography and fiction are met together; novel and poetry, like righteousness and peace, have kissed each other. Ambiguity dilutes taxonomy. We now read "it" because it is by Lessing or Pynchon, Mailer or Millett,...
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