May Sarton (Eleanor May Sarton) Biography

American poet and novelist, born at Wondelgem in Belgium; from 1916 onward she grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where she was educated at the Latin School. From 1937 she taught creative writing at American colleges and universities. Encounter in April (1937), her first collection of verse, established the meditative and descriptive concerns central to much of her poetry; in both free verse and strict traditional forms, her work explores relations between art and nature, its often impassioned lyricism subdued by her restrained directness of tone. Subsequent collections include The Lion and the Rose (1948), Land of Silence (1953), A Private Mythology (1966), Letters from Maine (1984), and The Silence Now (1988); Collected Poems 1930–1973 appeared in 1974. Tensions between individual values and the demands of political necessity form a recurrent theme in her numerous novels, which include The Bridge of Years (1946), depicting the impact of the First World War on a Belgian family; Faithful Are the Wounds (1955), which culminates in the suicide of an eminent professor placed under intolerable pressures during the McCarthy investigations; and Mrs Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing (1965), a parable of the situation of the female artist. Among Sarton's autobiographical publications are I Knew a Phoenix (1959), Plant Dreaming Deep (1968), and At Seventy: A Journal (1984).