SOURCE: DeShazer, Mary K. “‘Toward Durable Fire’: the Solitary Muse of May Sarton.” In That Great Sanity: Critical Essays on May Sarton, edited by Susan Swartzlander and Marilyn R. Mumford, pp. 119-50. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1992.

In the following essay, DeShazer analyzes Sarton's complex treatment of “crucial relationship between the woman poet and her muse” as evidenced in the poems of A Durable Fire.

“We have to make myths of our lives,” May Sarton says in Plant Dreaming Deep. “It is the only way to live them without despair.”¹ Of the many twentieth-century American women poets who are mythmakers, Sarton speaks most urgently and often about what it means to be a woman and a writer and about the female muse as a primary source of poetic inspiration. In the fourth “Autumn Sonnet” from A Durable Fire, she describes the crucial relationship between the woman...