SOURCE: Drake, William. “May Sarton's Lyric Strategy.” In That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton, edited by Susan Swartzlander and Marilyn R. Mumford, pp. 49-63. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Drake examines the connection between Sarton's spirituality and her lyricism.

The genesis of a lyric poem, for May Sarton, lies in silence. “Silence / is infinitely more precious to me / than any word,” she wrote in “Request,” in her first volume of poems published in 1937.¹ And for the more than fifty years that have followed, in almost every one of her books, the theme is never out of sight. The titles The Land of Silence (1953), Halfway to Silence (1980), and The Silence Now (1988) indicate its permanence and continuity, culminating in what has finally become “immense … deep down, not to be escaped.”²

Silence, in Sarton's universe, is the inner region where the ego finds itself...