SOURCE: Taylor, Henry. “Home to a Place beyond Exile: The Collected Poems of May Sarton.” Hollins Critic 11, no. 3 (June 1974) 1-16.

In the following essay, Taylor presents a retrospective of Sarton's career as a poet up to the publication of her Collected Poems.

I

The retrospective exhibition of a poetic career may be either highly selective or generously inclusive; the choice the author makes between these two approaches has much to do with the sort of poet he is. The highly selective poet, whose definitive collection contains less than half of his published work, is likely to think of poetry as the production of separate finished pieces. The author of the more inclusive collection, on the other hand, is more forgiving of failures and false moves, on the grounds that poetry, as a way of perceiving and knowing, is a process in which one important thing is the trail...